Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: For decades, we have been staring up into the infinite
Speaker 2: dark of the cosmos just well, listening, waiting, right, waiting.
Speaker 2: We've built these massive dishes, these sprawling arrays across deserts
Speaker 2: and valleys, all tuned to the silence of space, and
Speaker 2: we're listening for on one highly specific type of sound.
Speaker 3: And it's an assumption the entire scientific community has held
Speaker 3: onto with almost absolute certainty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the idea that if an advanced extraterrestrial civilization wanted
Speaker 2: to reach out you say hello, they would broadcast the
Speaker 2: signal so mathematically precise, so impossibly concentrated, that it couldn't
Speaker 2: possibly be a mistake.
Speaker 3: Exactly. We've been hunting for an artificial whisper in the dark.
Speaker 2: The ultranaro frequency.
Speaker 3: Spike right billions of dollars entire careers have been banked
Speaker 3: on this one idea that an alien beacon would arrive
Speaker 3: as this pristine razor thin line of pure electromagnetic energy.
Speaker 2: But there is a massive problem with that assumption.
Speaker 3: A huge problem. It basically treats the universe like it's
Speaker 3: an empty, passive vacuum. We've treated interstellar space as if
Speaker 3: it's a quiet concert hall where a single drop pin
Speaker 3: would just echo perfectly for a million.
Speaker 2: Light years, which it absolutely is.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. The reality is that the cosmos
Speaker 3: is a violently active, incredibly hostile environment for any kind
Speaker 3: of electromagnetic communication.
Speaker 2: So that exact pristine razor thin signal we've been banking
Speaker 2: on it might actually be actively destroyed by the universe
Speaker 2: before it even has a chance to leave its home
Speaker 2: star system.
Speaker 3: That's the core of it. Back in twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: researchers doctor Vashal Gajar and Gray C. Brown introduced this
Speaker 3: concept of exo interplanetary medium scattering or EXOIPM scattering.
Speaker 2: For sure, XOIPM scattering, yes, and.
Speaker 3: It fundamentally acts as the hidden gate keeper of alien signals.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want you to imagine something. Imagine you are
Speaker 2: the lead engineer on an alien world. You've spent centuries
Speaker 2: of your civilization's GDP building the ultimate interstellar megaphone.
Speaker 3: The pinnacle of your technology, exactly.
Speaker 2: And you finally hit send on your masterpiece of a message.
Speaker 2: It's a perfectly clear, ultra narrow broadcast aimed right at
Speaker 2: the Milky Way. But before that pristine signal even clears
Speaker 2: the orbit of your outer planets.
Speaker 3: Your own son gets in the way.
Speaker 2: Yes, the weather of your own son, This turbulent, churning
Speaker 2: plasma of your star scrambles your perfect message into unrecognizable static.
Speaker 3: It's the ultimate galactic reply all disaster.
Speaker 2: You're screaming into the void, but your own son is
Speaker 2: acting like a muffler.
Speaker 3: It really forces a complete reckoning with how we understand
Speaker 3: and the physics of stars, and also the hidden blind
Speaker 3: spots of our own computational.
Speaker 2: Technology, because we are faced with this haunting possibility that
Speaker 2: the cosmos isn't actually quiet at all.
Speaker 3: We might simply be listening in completely the wrong way.
Speaker 2: So to really grasp the mechanics of this XOAPM scattering,
Speaker 2: we first have to understand the basely difference between natural
Speaker 2: astrophysical radio emissions and well engineered techno signatures.
Speaker 3: The symphony of chaos versus the artificial whisper.
Speaker 2: Right, because the universe is notoriously loud. It is screaming
Speaker 2: in radio waves constantly. But the noise of star makes
Speaker 2: and the noise a deliberate transmitter makes they are completely different.
Speaker 3: Beasts, completely different natural celestial bodies and unguided astrophysical processes.
Speaker 3: They simply do not emit perfectly narrow radio signals.
Speaker 2: They broadcast across a massive, sweeping range of frequencies exactly.
Speaker 3: The universe is filled with incredibly violent, chaotic physical processes.
Speaker 3: When you look at pulsars or quasars or the cosmic
Speaker 3: microwave background, you are observing physics at its absolute extreme.
Speaker 2: Let's break that down a bit. Take a process like
Speaker 2: synchrotron radiation for example.
Speaker 3: Right, synchrotron radiation, so out in deep space you have
Speaker 3: these powerful, twisting magnetic fields. When electrons interact with that environment.
Speaker 2: They get caught and they begin spiraling.
Speaker 3: Spiraling around those magnetic field lines at relativistic speeds, meaning
Speaker 3: they are moving at a significant fraction of the speed
Speaker 3: of light.
Speaker 2: And as they spiral and accelerate, their shedding energy.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, they shed it in the form of electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 3: But because the speeds, the magnetic field strengths, and the
Speaker 3: angles of trajectory are just totally chaotic and constantly varying.
Speaker 2: The resulting radiation is.
Speaker 3: Smeared heavily, smeared across a vast spectrum of frequencies. It
Speaker 3: is this massive, uncoordinated blast of radio noise.
Speaker 2: And then you throw in plasma collisions. I mean, I
Speaker 2: know there's another major source of broad spectrum noise when
Speaker 2: particles start literally slamming into each other.
Speaker 3: Ah, you're referring to Bremstralle.
Speaker 2: Right breaking radiation exactly.
Speaker 3: This happens when a charged particle like an electron is
Speaker 3: violently deflected by another charged particle like an atomic nucleus.
Speaker 2: It essentially slams on the brakes.
Speaker 3: And in the quantum realm, when a charged particle is
Speaker 3: violently decelerated or deflected like that, that lost kinetic energy
Speaker 3: has to go somewhere. It is emitted as electromagnetic energy.
Speaker 2: So in a dense plasma cloud you have what billions
Speaker 2: of these.
Speaker 3: Collisions, billions of them happening randomly at varying speeds, varying angles.
Speaker 3: The resulting radio waves are broadcast over a very broad,
Speaker 3: very messy spectrum.
Speaker 2: It's like a massive chaotic orchestra warming up before a performance.
Speaker 2: You have hundreds of musicians. The violinists are plucking strings,
Speaker 2: The brass section is blowing random blasts of air. The
Speaker 2: percussionists are dropping things.
Speaker 3: That's absolute noise.
Speaker 2: The sound is smeared across every possible audio frequency. There
Speaker 2: is no coherence. That broad spectrum noise is the cachaotic
Speaker 2: orchestra of natural celestial emissions.
Speaker 3: And in that environment, an engineered techno signature, that ultra
Speaker 3: narrow signal we've been searching for is mathematically modeled to
Speaker 3: be just a few herts.
Speaker 2: Wide, So it wouldn't be the chaotic warm up.
Speaker 3: No, it would be a single, perfectly sustained note on
Speaker 3: a tuning fork, piercing through all that chaotic noise.
Speaker 2: Sounds so deliberate that your brain immediately registers, oh, someone
Speaker 2: is doing that on purpose exactly.
Speaker 3: A natural unguided celestial mechanism is basically completely incapable of
Speaker 3: generating a signal that is perfectly compressed into a bandwidth
Speaker 3: of just a few herts.
Speaker 2: So if astronomer looks at a spectrographic signature, and it
Speaker 2: presents this pristine vertical line on the data plod The
Speaker 2: math just dictates it must be a delivered transmission, and.
Speaker 3: That specific mathematical logic has driven the entire architecture of
Speaker 3: our search. Decades of telescope time, massive infrastructure projects, they've
Speaker 3: all been built on the foundation of looking for that tuning.
Speaker 2: Fork, which brings us to a massive structural vulnerability in
Speaker 2: how we actually process astronomical data. We have an interstellar
Speaker 2: blind spot.
Speaker 3: A huge one.
Speaker 2: But wait, practically speaking, it's not like astronomers are ignoring
Speaker 2: the fact that space is messy. I mean, our current
Speaker 2: computational pipelines are incredibly sophisticated.
Speaker 3: Oh, they are brilliant.
Speaker 2: We know about the interstellar medium, right, that diffuse plasma
Speaker 2: between the stars, and we have dedispersion algorithms to clean
Speaker 2: up the signal, don't we.
Speaker 3: We do, and they are incredibly effective at what they're
Speaker 3: designed to do. Existing detection algorithms strictly account for the
Speaker 3: distortions that radio waves experience while traversing the vast distances
Speaker 3: of interstellar space.
Speaker 2: Because when radio waves travel through that low density, diffuse
Speaker 2: plasma of the interstellar medium, they experience dispersion and scintillation.
Speaker 3: Right, and the dispersion physics are fascinating because it's essentially
Speaker 3: this massive cosmic race where the lower frequencies.
Speaker 2: Lose the lower frequencies lose the race.
Speaker 3: I love that it is fundamentally a problem of speed
Speaker 3: and frequency interacting with plasma. Lower frequency radio waves interact
Speaker 3: more heavily with the free electrons in the interstellar medium
Speaker 3: than higher frequency.
Speaker 2: Waves do, so there's more drag.
Speaker 3: Exactly as a result, the lower frequency components of a
Speaker 3: signal travel marginally slower through this diffuse plasma.
Speaker 2: So if an alien civilization transmits a signal with multiple
Speaker 2: frequency components simultaneously.
Speaker 3: Those waves fan out over a journey of thousands of
Speaker 3: light years.
Speaker 2: And the higher frequencies arrive at Earth first, while the.
Speaker 3: Lower frequencies arrive with a measurable temporal delay.
Speaker 2: Okay, so a sharp instantaneous burst arrives at Earth stretched out.
Speaker 2: It ends up sounding more like a descending whistle because
Speaker 2: the high notes at the telescope before the low notes.
Speaker 3: Yes, and current search algorithms deploy highly complex dispersion techniques
Speaker 3: to counteract this exact effect.
Speaker 2: They fix the whistle.
Speaker 3: Right astronomers mathematically calculate the colon density of free electrons
Speaker 3: in the interstellar space separating Earth from the target star.
Speaker 2: They figure out how much stuff is in the.
Speaker 3: Way exactly, and using that calculation, the algorithms realign the frequencies.
Speaker 3: They shift the delayed lower frequencies back in time to
Speaker 3: perfectly reconstruct the original signal.
Speaker 2: So we are absolute masters at cleaning up the dirt
Speaker 2: from the interstellar highway.
Speaker 3: We are.
Speaker 2: But here's the fatal flaw in the entire operation. These
Speaker 2: brilliant algorithms operate on one massive underlying assumption.
Speaker 3: They assume that the signal entered interstellar space in perfect condition.
Speaker 2: Right. They assume the structural integrity of the radio wave
Speaker 2: is entirely undisturbed between the alien transmitter and the edge
Speaker 2: of its host stars system.
Speaker 3: The algorithms meticulously correct for the long highway between the stars,
Speaker 3: completely ignoring the incredibly treacherous dirt road the signal has
Speaker 3: to travel just to get out of its own planetary system.
Speaker 2: They assume the starting line is clean.
Speaker 3: And it isn't. Doctor Gajar and Grace C. Brown's twenty
Speaker 3: twenty six findings reveal that the astrosphere of a host
Speaker 3: star is a violently disruptive environment.
Speaker 2: We're shifting away from theater radical computer algorithms now and
Speaker 2: diving into the concrete, highly chaotic physics of a star's
Speaker 2: environment because we tend to think of stars as these static,
Speaker 2: glowing backdrops.
Speaker 3: But they are turbulent, magnetic oscillator.
Speaker 2: Incredibly dynamic, violent engine.
Speaker 3: Right. To understand how it actually destroys a signal, we
Speaker 3: have to look at the specific agents of distortion within
Speaker 3: the host stars astrosphere.
Speaker 2: Starting with stellar winds.
Speaker 3: Yes, stellar winds create a highly structured, constantly shifting refractive environment.
Speaker 3: These are streams of free electrons and protons blowing outward
Speaker 3: from the star at tremendous speeds.
Speaker 2: And it's a fluctuating, dense medium. But stellar winds are
Speaker 2: just the baseline rather, right, You also have the severe storms.
Speaker 3: The episodic eruptive events, yeah, coronal mass ejections or CMEs,
Speaker 3: and powerful stellar flares.
Speaker 2: Let's define a CME for a second.
Speaker 3: A CME is a massive expulsion of plasma and magnetic
Speaker 3: field from the star's corona. Billions of tons of superheated
Speaker 3: plasma are literally hurled out into the planetary system.
Speaker 2: They carry these incredibly complex, twisting magnetic fields.
Speaker 3: With them exactly so our alien engineer fires up their machine.
Speaker 3: The perfectly mathematically narrow tuning fork signal leaves the planet's atmosphere.
Speaker 2: And immediately slams into this stellar space weather it.
Speaker 3: Hits the fluctuating stellar winds, or it gets caught in
Speaker 3: the turbulent wake of a coronal mass ejection.
Speaker 2: And this is where we see the mechanics of EXOIPM smearing,
Speaker 2: which is fundamentally rooted in optical multipath propagation.
Speaker 3: Yes, when perfectly coherent radio waves hit a region of
Speaker 3: fluctuating electron density, they experience varying indices of refraction.
Speaker 2: Because the stellar plasma's density is violently fluctuating in milliseconds.
Speaker 3: Right, So the radio wave experiences rapid phase variations.
Speaker 2: So the electrons in the stellar plasma are swirling around
Speaker 2: their pooling, they're thinning out instantly, and so the signal
Speaker 2: is being bent and deflected a billion different ways simultaneously.
Speaker 3: The rapid phase variations physically scatter the photons. The signal
Speaker 3: does not just pass straight through, It takes multiple different
Speaker 3: paths through the turbulent plasma.
Speaker 2: Because the photons take slightly different paths, they arrive at
Speaker 2: slightly different times.
Speaker 3: And that physical redistribution of electromagnetic energy mutates the transmission.
Speaker 3: A sharp, concentrated tone is morphed into a wide, faint,
Speaker 3: dispersed footprint.
Speaker 2: Imagine trying to shine a perfectly tight laser pointer through
Speaker 2: a violently boiling pot of water.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to visualize it.
Speaker 2: The photons don't cease to exist, but the turbulent boiling
Speaker 2: water bends and scatters the light so severely that on
Speaker 2: the wall behind the pot, you don't see a sharp
Speaker 2: laser dot.
Speaker 3: You just see a faint, flickering, completely smeared wash of light.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what a star's plasma does to an
Speaker 2: alien radio signal.
Speaker 3: The signal is shattered. This mathematical consequence is sometimes referred
Speaker 3: to as the radio silence hypothesis.
Speaker 2: The radio silence hypothesis.
Speaker 3: Yes, the signal broadening physically renders technosignature is completely invisible
Speaker 3: to our current SETI searches.
Speaker 2: But if the energy is still there, if the photons
Speaker 2: didn't vanish in the boiling water, why can't our multi
Speaker 2: billion dollar telescope see it.
Speaker 3: It comes down to the rigorous physics of energy conservation
Speaker 3: and how that dictates the failure of our algorithms.
Speaker 2: Okay, walk me through that.
Speaker 3: Well, the plasma surrounding the star is non absorptive. It
Speaker 3: does not actually consume the radio waves energy. Right, The
Speaker 3: total amount of electromagnetic energy that left the alien transmitter
Speaker 3: remains exactly the same. The total energy is constant. However,
Speaker 3: because the bandwidth of the signal increases drastically due to
Speaker 3: the XOPM scattering, the peak amplitude, which is the intensity
Speaker 3: of the signal at any one specific frequency, must drop proportionally.
Speaker 2: Think of a teaspoon of jam, a tea spoon and jam.
Speaker 2: Stick with me here. The jam represents the total constant
Speaker 2: energy of the alien radio signal. Okay, if you take
Speaker 2: that jam and place it onto a tiny cracker, you
Speaker 2: get a tall, highly visible, concentrated amount of jam.
Speaker 3: Right, that's your ultra narrowband signal.
Speaker 2: But the stars plasma subjects the signal to XOPM scattering.
Speaker 2: It forces you to take that exact same amount of
Speaker 2: jam and spread it out evenly over a giant, sixteen
Speaker 2: inch pizza crust.
Speaker 3: The total energy hasn't changed. You still have one teaspoon
Speaker 3: of jam.
Speaker 2: But because it has been smeared across such a broad area,
Speaker 2: it becomes an imperceptibly thin, practically invisible.
Speaker 3: Layer, and that thin layer causes modern automated algorithms to fail.
Speaker 3: The pipelines deploy what are called matched filters, designed to
Speaker 3: look at the cracker, not the pizza crust.
Speaker 2: They are optimized to look for power accumulating in extremely
Speaker 2: narrow frequency bins.
Speaker 3: They're checking millions of tiny channels looking for a massive
Speaker 3: spike of energy in just.
Speaker 2: One of them, and if the stars plasma scatters the photons,
Speaker 2: that power leaks out into thousands of adjacent bins exactly.
Speaker 3: The algorithm checks that original narrow bin and sees only
Speaker 3: a tiny fraction of the original energy.
Speaker 2: Because the energy is diluted across so many.
Speaker 3: Channels, right, and so the algorithm fails to accumulate a
Speaker 3: sufficient signal to noise ratio. The signal falls below rigid
Speaker 3: detection thresholds.
Speaker 2: The computer looks right at it, flags it as an
Speaker 2: automated non detection and just classifies it as background noise.
Speaker 3: Which directly addresses the historical lack of detected signals. We've
Speaker 3: wondered for decades why the sky is so quiet.
Speaker 2: This hypothesis suggests the sky isn't quiet.
Speaker 3: At all, not at all. Signals might physically be hitting
Speaker 3: Earth's radio dishes right now, but because they have been
Speaker 3: smeared out by their own sun's weather, they masquerade as
Speaker 3: diffuse background noise.
Speaker 2: We are filtering out the exact thing we are looking
Speaker 2: for because it doesn't look the way we expected it to.
Speaker 3: It's a profound paradigm shift. But theoretical physics isn't enough
Speaker 3: to change an entire scientific field. You have to ground
Speaker 3: the theory with empirical data.
Speaker 2: You need proof exactly.
Speaker 3: Researchers quantified and proved that XOIPM scattering actually happens by
Speaker 3: using our own solar system.
Speaker 2: Now that is fascinating. How do you prove that a
Speaker 2: star ruins an alien signal when you don't actually have
Speaker 2: an alien signal to test it on.
Speaker 3: You establish boundary conditions and calibration metrics. Researchers needed a baseline.
Speaker 3: They needed a perfectly continuous, narrow band signal passing through
Speaker 3: a known measurable plasma environment.
Speaker 2: So they used human engineering.
Speaker 3: Yes, they used our own transmissions as artificial techno signatures. Specifically,
Speaker 3: the telemetry transmissions from our deep space probes like.
Speaker 2: The Voyager probes and planetary orbital exactly.
Speaker 3: It's a brilliant experimental design really.
Speaker 2: Because we built those spacecrafts so we have absolute knowledge
Speaker 2: of their origin frequency.
Speaker 3: We know their transmission power and their uncorrupted spectral profile.
Speaker 3: We know exactly what the signal looks like when it
Speaker 3: leaves the antenna, and.
Speaker 2: They operate within the localized plasma environment. We can observe
Speaker 2: right here the solar wind of our own Sun.
Speaker 3: Right so, observatories on Earth meticulously measured these known telemetry
Speaker 3: signals as the lineup site between the spacecraft and Earth
Speaker 3: passed through varying density of our Sun's plasma winds.
Speaker 2: Because during certain orbital alignments, a spacecraft's signal actually has
Speaker 2: to pass very close to the edge of the Sun
Speaker 2: to reach Earth.
Speaker 3: Right it grazes the Sun's atmosphere during a solar conjunction.
Speaker 2: And what did they find.
Speaker 3: The researchers contrasted the data from these different alignments. When
Speaker 3: the transmission passed close to the dense, highly turbulent solar corona,
Speaker 3: they observed extreme smearing.
Speaker 2: The pristine telemetry signal.
Speaker 3: Was shattered broadened, just as the theory predicted, but when
Speaker 3: the alignment shifted and the radio waves only passed through
Speaker 3: the thinner quiescent solar wind far away.
Speaker 2: From the Sun, the observed minimal smearing.
Speaker 3: The signal remained relatively narrow and intact.
Speaker 2: So they literally watched our own sun destroy our own
Speaker 2: signals and measured exactly how much it was happening based
Speaker 2: on the plasma density exactly.
Speaker 3: The result was a precise mathematical correlation between measured plasma
Speaker 3: column density and the resulting degree of frequency smearing observed
Speaker 3: at Earth's receiving stations, and with.
Speaker 2: This localized data, they created a scalable framework to estimate
Speaker 2: signal broadening across the cosmos.
Speaker 3: Which pivots this from a fascinating physics experiment into a
Speaker 3: major crisis for traditional target selection because when.
Speaker 2: You take this math, which was calibrated on our relatively
Speaker 2: calm Sun, and apply it to the rest of the galaxy,
Speaker 2: you slam right into the M dwarf dilemma.
Speaker 3: The M dwarf dilemma, it fundamentally alters the search for
Speaker 3: life because it concerns the dominant stellar demographic in the Milky.
Speaker 2: Way M dwarfs or red dwarfs.
Speaker 3: Right, they make up approximately seventy five percent of the
Speaker 3: stars in our galaxy.
Speaker 2: Seventy five percent. That is a massive majority. Statistically, any
Speaker 2: comprehensive search for life just has to heavily prioritize them.
Speaker 3: But applying the XOIPM scattering framework to a red dwarf
Speaker 3: environment paints a chaotic picture of space weather. They aren't
Speaker 3: just smaller, dimmer versions of our Sun.
Speaker 2: Their internal physics are fundamentally different.
Speaker 3: M dwells are fully convective, star fully convective.
Speaker 2: Explain how that differs from our Sun.
Speaker 3: In our Sun, energy is generated in the core, it
Speaker 3: travels through a radiative zone, and only the outer envelope
Speaker 3: is convective. But in an M dwarf, the convection zone
Speaker 3: extends all the way down to the core. Superheated boiling
Speaker 3: plasma circulates directly from the nuclear furnace at the core
Speaker 3: all the way to the surface in massive chaotic loops.
Speaker 2: That sounds intense that fully convective structure must generate incredibly powerful,
Speaker 2: wildly chaotic magnetic dynamos.
Speaker 3: It does, and correlating the EXOIPM framework to this environment
Speaker 3: indicates extreme plasma turbulence. Their stellar winds are far denser
Speaker 3: than our suns, and their eruptive events are catastrophic by
Speaker 3: our standards.
Speaker 2: So the coronal mass ejections and stellar flares from an
Speaker 2: active M dwarf are exponentially more violent and frequent than
Speaker 2: anything our sun produces.
Speaker 3: Yes, which highlights this massive paradox, the habitability versus detectability paradox.
Speaker 2: Because as astronomers get incredibly excited finding rocky Earth sized
Speaker 2: planets in the habitable zones of red.
Speaker 3: Dwarfs, naturally, because the stars are dim, the zone where
Speaker 3: liquid water can exist is tucked very close to the star.
Speaker 2: They might have oceans, a perfect climate for biology the
Speaker 2: whole nine yards.
Speaker 3: But because that habitable planet is tucked in so close
Speaker 3: to a highly active red dwarf, it is constantly blasted
Speaker 3: by that exponentially violent space weather.
Speaker 2: The EXOIPM scattering model proves that while the planet might
Speaker 2: be perfectly habitable, the star's extreme plasma environment guarantees the
Speaker 2: complete spectrographic destruction of any radio signal that an alien
Speaker 2: civilization tries to send us.
Speaker 3: They have water, but they're stuck in a permanent radio
Speaker 3: blackout of their own stars.
Speaker 2: Making a permanent radio blackout.
Speaker 3: Civilization could be highly technologically advanced and transmitting continuously, but
Speaker 3: the inescapable disruptive medium of their own stars plasma permanently
Speaker 3: broadens their signal into invisibility.
Speaker 2: It forces a complete recalculation of target selection. In radio astronomy,
Speaker 2: it has.
Speaker 3: To prioritizing stars based solely on traditional habitability metrics like
Speaker 3: rocky composition or liquid water is no longer mathematically sound.
Speaker 3: If our goal is to detect narrow band radio.
Speaker 2: Signals, the habitability metrics must be cross reference with the
Speaker 2: star's localized plasma emission profile exactly. Okay practically speaking, though,
Speaker 2: if an earth like planet orbiting an M dwarf represents
Speaker 2: a significantly lower probability target for traditional narrowband searches and
Speaker 2: we basically abandon the narrow band filters, aren't we just
Speaker 2: opening the floodgates every random piece of cosmic noise?
Speaker 3: That is the big question.
Speaker 2: How do we actually filter for a smeared signal without
Speaker 2: drowning and falls positives.
Speaker 3: The twenty twenty six study details the necessary implementation of
Speaker 3: dynamic time warping.
Speaker 2: Algorithms dynamic time warping.
Speaker 3: Yes, instead of deploying single channel match filters looking for
Speaker 3: an isolated spike. Dynamic time warping algorithms are explicitly trained
Speaker 3: to recognize the spectrographic profiles of degraded plasma scattered signals.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how do they do that?
Speaker 3: They are programmed to search for a Gaussian like spread
Speaker 3: of energy.
Speaker 2: So instead of asking is there a massive spike in
Speaker 2: channel A, the algorithm masks, is there an unnatural synchronized
Speaker 2: elevation of energy across channels A through Z that matches
Speaker 2: the mathematical profile of a signal smeared by a chronal
Speaker 2: mass ejection exactly.
Speaker 3: The algorithm dynamically integrates power over a determined range of
Speaker 3: adjacent frequency channels. It hunts for the dispersed footprint, the
Speaker 3: widen shadow of a techno signature, rather than a singular spike.
Speaker 2: It is designed to detect that thin, broad layer of energy.
Speaker 2: The old algorithm's just totally ignored, right.
Speaker 3: It represents a massive philosophical shift for the scientific community.
Speaker 3: We are moving from the concept of optimal transmission to
Speaker 3: the harsh reality of actual reception.
Speaker 2: Because historically we built detection machines based on theoretical perfection.
Speaker 2: We looked at what an extraterrestrial intelligence might optimally transmit
Speaker 2: to be energy efficient.
Speaker 3: We assumed perfect logic.
Speaker 2: But perfect logic doesn't they count for boiling plasma.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't. The physical parameters of the intervening astrosphere
Speaker 3: absolutely must dictate the parameters of our reception.
Speaker 2: It's a wild journey to think about. We started with
Speaker 2: the dream of the pristine alien beacon piercing the quiet dark,
Speaker 2: and we journeyed right into the turbulent reality of stellar astrospheres.
Speaker 3: We've seen how XOIPM scattering physically shatters and smears photons,
Speaker 3: spreading their energy and dropping their peak amplitude.
Speaker 2: Causing traditional matched filter algorithms to fail entirely, and.
Speaker 3: The empirical calibration using the voyager probes proved this smearing
Speaker 3: is a measurable, scalable fact. Our blind reliance on idealized
Speaker 3: models made our computational pipelines inherently blind to the realities
Speaker 3: of a very messy universe, which.
Speaker 2: Leaves us with a final chilling realization about the vast
Speaker 2: archives of astronomical data we've already collected.
Speaker 3: Think about the decades of raw data sitting on hard
Speaker 3: drives in server farms.
Speaker 2: Right now, petabytes of radio observations, and for all those years,
Speaker 2: the historical algorithms were ruthlessly systematically filtering out and discarding
Speaker 2: anything that wasn't a perfect narrow spike.
Speaker 3: If the rigorous application of this EXOIPM broadening framework holds true,
Speaker 3: actual extraterrestrial techno signatures may have already been collected by
Speaker 3: Earth's observatories.
Speaker 2: The signals might already be here, yes, because their spectrographic
Speaker 2: profiles were physically smeared by the turbulent plasma of their
Speaker 2: home stars, the automated pipelines classified them as natural background noise.
Speaker 3: The raw, uncompressed data of alien contact might literally be
Speaker 3: sitting in a digital archive right now.
Speaker 2: Just waiting for the correctly calibrated XOIPM scattering detection methodologies
Speaker 2: to be applied.
Speaker 3: The whisper was there all along, We.
Speaker 2: Just didn't know how to listen to the noise.
Speaker 3: The.
Speaker 2: School US said,