This extremely bright barrage of radio waves initially looked like a real SETI detection, but no one has been able to verify it or find it again. ”It comes down to being able to tell the difference between a very distant technosignature and our own technology.”Īnd then there are the signals that astronomers haven’t been able to definitively pin to a natural source, such as the famous “WOW!” signal picked up by the Ohio State University Radio Observatory, colloquially known as Big Ear, in 1977. There are tons of signals,” Siemion says. “All of our SETI experiments are conducted in an absolute sea of interference. Signals called perytons, which are less energetic bursts of radio emission, also raised eyebrows until scientists determined their origin: a microwave oven.īLC-1 could be beaming from an object that isn’t transmitting as expected: a satellite that hasn’t been identified yet, a plane traveling overhead, a transmitter on the ground near the telescope’s line of sight, or perhaps something even more mundane, like faulty electronics in a nearby building or a passing car. The first known fast radio bursts-brief blasts of radio waves that are still somewhat mysterious-initially seemed as though they could be artificial signals. Some turned out to come from previously unknown astronomical sources such as pulsars, the rapidly rotating corpses of dead stars that beam radio waves into the cosmos. Over the decades, astronomers have detected numerous candidate signals. “Our WiFi, our cell towers, our GPS, our satellite radio-all of this looks exactly like the signals that we’re searching for, which makes it very hard to tell if something is from space or from human-generated technology.” “Only human technology seems to produce signals like that,” Sheikh says. They would also have a characteristic “drift” indicating that the source is moving toward or away from Earth-a clue that the radio source is coming from a distant cosmic object, such as a planet orbiting a star. Such signals would cover a very narrow range of radio frequencies. Unlike radio waves the cosmos produces naturally, these whispers from extraterrestrials are expected to look a lot like the transmissions humans use to communicate.

Scientists have been scanning the skies for radio signals that could be artificial in origin for 60 years-starting with Project Ozma, a search conducted in 1960 by my dad, Frank Drake.

It’s aliens! It’s awesome!” Six decades of searching for extraterrestrials “The reason we’re so excited about SETI, and why we dedicate our careers to it, is the same reason why the public gets so excited about it. “There’s a lot of talk about sensationalism in SETI,” says Andrew Siemion, Breakthrough Listen’s principal investigator. While researchers continue to analyze the signal-and experts caution that there is almost certainly an ordinary, terrestrial explanation-even a remote hint of life beyond Earth has people excited. (The detection was leaked to The Guardian before the research was ready for publication.) The team is preparing two papers describing the signal and a follow-up analysis, which isn’t yet complete. Though Sheikh and others strongly suspect that the signal is really human in origin, BLC-1 is the most tantalizing detection Breakthrough has made so far in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

“It’s pretty expected that every now and then you’ll see something weird, but this is interesting because it’s something that’s weird that we’re having to think about the next steps,” says Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University and the Breakthrough team member leading the signal analysis. The radio waves were picked up in observations made between April and May 2019. Adding to the excitement, at least two planets orbit this star, one of which might be temperate and rocky like Earth.īreakthrough Listen, a decade-long search for alien broadcasts from the nearest million stars, was using Australia’s Parkes Observatory to study Proxima Centauri when the team detected the conspicuous signal, which they dubbed BLC-1. An as-yet unexplained radio signal appears to be coming from the direction of the star closest to the sun-a small red star roughly 4.2 light-years away called Proxima Centauri. Astronomers searching for signs of life beyond Earth have spotted something strange.

Alien news boadcast