Anomaly scanning tip

Signature Anomalies are strange things.

You scan them down and find all sorts of things hidden behind them. Wormholes, but also relic and data sites. One wonders how it can be that there is a steady daily stream of these anomalies in every system, every day.

Hasn't there been a very thorough search yet of the home worlds? How come these things keep popping up? For the temporary wormholes, it is not hard to understand, but sites that remained hidded for many centuries or even milennia? Why do they pop up? Is it because their cloaking finally failed? Or because the many baseliner vessels that we don't see on our scans came accross them?

No, it's got to do with the fickle nature of solar winds and how they interact with celestials. These reveal disturbances, in a random and ever changing way, leading to this constant stream of anomalies we find. This leads to an interesting tip for scanning. Say, you see anomalies around a celestial like this:

The red spheres are 8 AU wide, and so you think you might need to set your scanners to 8 AU. But in fact, anomalies are never located further than 4 AU from a celestial! So, the best first step to scan down the above situation is to center your probes on the planet or celestial in the middle, and set range to 4 AU. This saves you time and effort in the scan, and will give good pinpointing results for all anomalies close to the celestial.