Some alien enthusiasts are excited by a new report that the Russian radio telescope RATAN-600 picked up a strong, unexplained radio signal coming from the direction of a solar system 94 light years from Earth, but leading experts warn against getting too excited.

Paul Delaney, a York University astrophysicist and astronomer, told CTV News Channel the signal has piqued interest because it came from HD 164595, a solar system with a star “almost identical to the sun,” and a Neptune-like planet that suggests an Earth-like planet could be nearby.

However, Delaney points out that the Allen Telescope Array in California has “listened to the star” in recent days without detecting anything unusual.

Besides, there are plenty of other possible causes, he said.

“The universe generates signals with enormous regularity and great variety,” he said. “This could be a solar flare (or) a microlensing event where the star is acting a little bit like a magnifying glass for a signal that is much further away and has been bent towards us.”

Delaney said the strength of the signal “makes people think it can’t be that far away -- maybe a local phenomenon.”

He said he also finds it odd that the Russian astronomers who detected the signal in May 2015 didn’t report it to international colleagues until recently.

Michael Reid, an astronomer with the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Toronto, said his “gut tells him” it was “not a civilization trying to communicate with us.”

He told CTV News Channel he suspects it may be “an equipment kind of issue.”

Although earthlings could point signals back now, that wouldn’t help much as it would take 94 years to reach the potential planet, Reid said.

Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, outlined in an online post a number of reasons why he thinks the signal is “not terribly promising.”

For one, he calculated that an alien radio transmitter blasting in all directions would need “hundreds of times more energy than all the sunlight falling on Earth” in order to produce that particular signal.

Shostak wrote that although it’s possible “another society is sending a signal our way … there are many other plausible explanations for this claimed transmission.”

“Without a confirmation of this signal,” he added, “we can only say that it’s ‘interesting.’”