Nah, Centauri money is ducats.
I think they must know the relative position and movement of Proxima b at the time the signal would have been emitted, and it doesn’t match the behavior of this signal.
Huh… blueshift means it’s moving towards us. So it was probably emitted from a spaceship on its way to visit to us! 
Ordinary people, including The Grauniad “science journalists”, often don’t use terms like this accurately or precisely. Yes, it should be stellar flare, but that’s an error by the article’s writer.
The suggestion that they were studying such flares seems to be an error by @Sam_Stone. I can’t find any mention of that in the original article or the others I’ve looked at. Those articles do mention stellar (or “solar” [sic]) flares in the context of discussing how unlikely it seems to be for life to develop on the most Earth-like known planet in the Proxima Centauri system.
Correct. On a star other than our sun it would probably be more correct to say “stellar flare”.
On the other hand, in Layman’s Land calling a different star than Sol “a sun” isn’t that unheard of. So depending on whether or not you’re talking to an actual scientist…
Wouldn’t a weather balloon change position such that its signal would not stay consistent over four hours (unless it was being purposely manipulated to mimic the position of Proxima Centauri… but how do you fine-tune a balloon’s position anyway?)?
A professional writer once told me: “Don’t make your readers do more work than necessary. They have short attention spans.”
In the future could you tell us what your initialisms are instead of expecting us to Google it? Thanks.
Even if this signal really is artificial* in origin it that doesn’t necessarily bean the source is indigenous to the Alpha Centauri system. Another civilization could have sent a probe/expedition to the system and that’s want transmitted the signal.
*Occam’s razor dictates this is either natural phenomena or an issue with out instruments.
I’m not he, but DME stands for “Distance Measuring Equipment” and was/is a 1950s tech for airplanes to determine their range to a ground based beacon. Simplifying mightily, the airplane emits a coded “beep” and the ground station replies with a same-coded “boop” and the airplane equipment measures the time difference from “beep” transmission to “boop” reception and converts that to a slant-range distance. The coding is how the multiple airplanes nearby can tell which “boop” is in response to their “beep”
The specific frequency of the Proxima signal corresponds to a DME frequency used only by ground stations associated with small airports. The transmitters are live 24/7/365, and the signal is significantly modulated by the 1950s tech coding scheme.
Bottom line being a normally functioning 982 MHz DME station is not a plausible source for the detected signal coming from the sky.
Once we posit the radio source is a malfunctioning man-made radio, there’s no particular reason to assume the malfunction signal’s frequency is the same as it’s non-malfunctioning frequency. IOW, once we guess it’s a haywire device, it could be almost any haywire device. As long as it’s hovering up in the sky in the correct direction for hours at a time.
As long as it’s not Rap.
Well, I needed that to make the diagonal in my 2020 apocalypse bingo.
Not to argue with a meme, but when in 2020 were we on the brink of WWIII?
“Coming of AntiChrist” is still open? Haven’t they been paying attention?
He didn’t come this year. (That’s what she said!)
Are they sure this isn’t the microwave in the observatory break room again? It’s happened before at that observatory.
It was just a slip-up on my part. You get used to typing ‘solar flare’, and I just did it automatically. Proxima Centauri, not being Sol, does not have solar flares. It has stellar flares.
No, my understanding is that Breakthrough bought some 30 minute observation windows from Psrkes while the scope was being used to monitor flares on Proxima. Breakthrough listen does not have hardware of its own that I know of, but uses its funding to buy trlescope time on other telescopes.
The article in The Guardian actually does say “solar” flares, so that wasn’t your slip up (or at least not yours alone).
That certainly makes sense. So, @Napier, there you go. The SETI scientists weren’t studying stellar flares. They just bought some time on telescopes that other scientists were using to study the stellar flares.
More poetically, it has Centaurian flares.
“Dammit, Bob! You have to properly close the door to the break room Faraday cage whenever you use the microwave. Read the sign!”
How fast is that Centaurian spaceship? If they don’t get here in the next few days it will be a 2021 alien invasion (or later) and you lose. On the bright side, there’s probably enough evidence for you to check off “powerful storms”, "historic floods:, and “mass extinction”. You might win that toaster oven yet!