Space flight sim Elite: Dangerous has been officially available on PC for about 19 months (and on Xbox One for about nine), but players have still explored only a vanishingly small fraction of the game’s 400,000,000,000 suns. Frontier Developments has repeatedly said that there are plenty of strange things out in the galaxy that no one has yet found—though one of those mysteries might soon be coming to a head.

Strange objects called "unknown artifacts" have been showing up in the game for months, all appearing in a rough sphere a bit more than 100 light years in diameter surrounding a particular star system: Merope. The artifacts would transmit strange messages to ships that got close enough to scan them. Sleuthy players eventually decoded the signals, revealing them to be encoded wireframe images of the players’ ships. The unknown artifacts also seemed to cause problems when collected by players—damaging systems and even shutting down entire space stations if sold on those stations’ black markets.

Call of the wild

Now, a second class of unknown objects, called "unknown probes," has recently been spotted. These appear to point at a particular planet in the Merope system: Merope 5C. Further, the probes exhibit some remarkable behavior when players scan them with system discovery scanners:

The video above was uploaded earlier this week and linked on the Elite: Dangerous subreddit and also on the Canonn Research subreddit (a player group dedicated to shedding light on the unknown probe/artifact enigma). After hitting the probe with the discovery scanner, the probe begins to glow, and then the player’s ship is temporarily disabled as the probe transmits a message (one totally different from the previous messages transmitted by the unknown artifacts).

Multiple players ran the transmission through a spectrographic analysis, which yielded the following rough image:

There appears to be a diagram embedded in the spectrograph (something musicians have done in the past to great effect). Stripped of the surrounding noise and with its aspect ratio adjusted, the hidden image appears to be this diagram:

Members of Canonn Research and other players seem to agree that the symbols around the edge of the diagram represent binary numbers: " - - | " is one, " - | - " is two, " - | | " is three, and " | - - " is four. But it remains unclear what the diagram means. The unknown probes’ focus on Merope 5C is clearly important, and the diagram appears to show a sphere—is it giving particular approach instructions for landing on the planet? Telling players where and how to find… something?

The big bad wolf-spider

Speculation among the Elite player base is that all of this is leading up to the appearance of the Thargoids, an insect-like race of extraterrestrials who figure prominently in Elite lore. Alternately implacably hostile and oddly allied in past games, the Thargoids’ presence or absence in Elite: Dangerous has been debated by fans since the game’s early alpha.

Ars has asked Frontier Developments many times over the past couple of years whether or not the Thargoids would make an appearance in the game; series creator David Braben has twice offered us a three word answer: "They are coming."

Are Thargoids hiding somewhere on or around Merope 5C, waiting for eager Elite commanders to find them? Will players find a peaceful race of benevolent space-spiders, or are they about to spring a giant galactic trap? It they are coming… are they almost here?

We’ve asked Frontier for comment, but the company has so far held its Thargoid cards very close to its chest. So far, the only official response has been this GalNet News post, which teases that there remains "much to discover." Meanwhile, readers wishing to follow the mystery can keep tabs on developments on the official forums, the Elite: Dangerous subreddit UA megathread, or the Canonn Research subreddit.

Update: shortly after publication, we got a response from Frontier: “We are unable to comment on galactic rumour and speculation.”

Fly safe, commanders. There may be monsters in the dark.