More inference of extra-terrestrial life was detected this week by astronomers, who again persist in ascribing such hints of the intelligence out there as some sort of wacky quick of physics among star limited in comprehensibility to due limitations of mathematics.

The event on the radar screens right about now is a bizarre little pulsar unromantically known as PSR J1903+0327. PSR J1903+0327, like its sister pulsar, is essentially the remnants left after a supernova explosion. Though (relatively - in astronomy, everything is relative) small in size, pulsars produce hundreds of thousands of times the gravity an object its size typically would. Pulsars spin at speeds of up to nearly 1,000 rotations per second, "or almost 20 percent light speed."

"As these neutron stars rotate," writes Clara Moskowitz at Space.com, "so too do their light beams. If a neutron star happens to be shooting out its jet in our direction, we call it a pulsar, because we see a pulse every time the rotating beam reaches us."

Now, what's puzzling astronomers about PSR J1903+0327 is its immediate neighborhood. While all known pulsars orbit white dwarf stars, the galactic freak "orbits a sun-like star along an oval path." Which should be impossible, at least according to Space.com.

The interesting part, at least for those of us who believe that evidence of massive interstellar engineering projects are observed by Earthside astronomers all the time, is that some homo sapiens have speculated that using the sweeping rhythm of the pulsar like a beacon might be a swell way to communicate with intelligence life on other planets:

...millisecond pulsars have characteristics and a distribution in space that make it possible to envisage communication being targeted towards and away from habstars (as defined by Turnbull & Tarter) aligned with pulsars in a specified way. Lists of candidate habstars and their pulsar alignments are included for those wishing to conduct searches using the strategy described.

The MPR solution to the astronomers' quandary? Well, it may be violating science's sacred Occam's Razor, but we're calling the strange case of PSR J1903+0327 an intergalactic lighthouse guiding the space-faring ... somewhere.

Wonder what they found on shore...