COULD aliens be “tickling” stars to communicate via a galaxy-spanning internet?
John Learned at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and colleagues reckon unstable yellow giant stars called “cepheid variables” could, in principle, be tweaked to send signals across vast distances.
Cepheids are so luminous they can be seen as far away as 60 million light years. They also pulse like clockwork. The researchers say that an energy kick at a crucial instant could advance the star’s pulsation, and so shorten the cycle, just as an electric shock to a human heart can advance a heartbeat. This kick could take the…
