The Blinking Stars

The internet as a whole yelled out that this had to be an alien signal when Laval University astronomers E.F. Borra and E. Trottier presented a report about a puzzling cluster of 234 stars that produced a weird blinking pulse of light on a regular basis.

Borra asserts that the patterns he anticipated would be seen in messages delivered by an alien civilization in a 2012 study are uncannily similar to the patterns visible from the stars. But to paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, every instance in which a puzzling signal from space has been discovered has a natural explanation.

However, Trottier and Borra are singing a different tune. They even provided reasons against at least three natural explanations for the phenomenon in order to support their claim that such a signal could only be explained by a civilisation seeking to communicate with us.

Although this is undoubtedly an odd assertion and we are unsure of what sort of processes could be responsible for these stars' peculiar appearance, a natural explanation cannot be ruled out. Galactic halo stars with unusual compositions and human mistake have both been proposed as explanations for the puzzling phenomenon.