Scientists with the SETI Institute - which stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - have dedicated two massive telescope arrays to tracking down the source of a mysterious and powerful radio signal from way, way out there.

Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science were first to pick up the signal, and only once in May 2015.  It appeared to come from the star HD 164595, a Sun-like star located roughly 95 light-years from Earth with at least one planet.  Assuming it was an intentional broadcast from an intelligent species, the amount of energy needed to get the signal from there to here is calculated to be equal to 10^13 to 10^20 Watts.  That's a lot of watts.

"That's a big energy bill even if you're getting a bulk discount from your local supplier," jokes Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California.  "It's hundreds of times more than all the energy falling on the Earth from sunlight."  IF this were by design, the senders would be considered a "Kardashev Type I civilization" by our scientists, which means a species able to harness all the starlight that falls on its home planet - Far more advanced than us.

But this is all speculation.  One blast of energy doesn't necessarily mean the Vulcans are coming to teach us logic.  Before astronomers jump to any conclusion, they’re attempting to detect the signal again using the Allen Telescope Array in northern California to track the star, and the optical SETI observatory in Panama in case the signal has been changed to optical frequencies.

Of course, not finding anything isn't a conclusion, either.  "You can't say because you didn't find something that there's nothing there," Dr. Shostak says.  "Say Captain Cook sailed around all day in the South Pacific and he didn't find any new islands.  That doesn't prove that there are no new islands, it just proves that he didn't find any that day."

And before anyone gets their hopes up too high, radio telescopes have let us down before.  Toilet flushes and terrestrial radios have been mistaken for waves coming from the heavens.  Just last year, the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia traced a mysterious type of radio signal to two on-site microwave ovens.