Was it a signal from an intelligent life in another solar system?
Or was the radio signal picked up in April 2019 and reported in December by various publications, just man-made interference, as everyone else so far seems to be?
Researchers at Penn State are among the scientists examining the signal through a radio telescope pointing to Proxima Centauri, the closest neighbor of our solar system.
‘It’s a kind of technological signal. The question is whether it’s Earth technology or technology from somewhere, ‘Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at Penn State, who leads a team studying the signal and trying to decipher its origin, told the New York Times.
She is part of Breakthrough Listen, a $ 100 million effort funded by Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner to find foreign radio waves.
Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star, invisible to the naked eye from Earth, and part of the three-star system of Alpha Centauri. It’s about 4.24 light years from us.
The star revolves around two known planets, one of which lives in the “habitable zone” that can support the earthly conditions that, according to our scientific life, will make life possible, as we know it.
It’s exciting, but researchers are cautiously optimistic.
“If you see such a signal and do not come from Earth, you know you have detected extraterrestrial technology,” Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, told Scientific American. “Unfortunately, people have started a lot of extraterrestrial technology.”
The supply of the narrowband 982.02 MHz signal does fall within a transmission area of our satellites and spacecraft.
But Astronomy.com reports that the signal appeared for five days of five minutes over a few days, while the telescope pointed directly at Proxima Centauri. When the telescope was turned away from the star, the signal disappeared.
Wright spoke to PennLive in 2019, shortly after the founding of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI), a world leader and global research center aimed at answering the big question.
And that big question – Are we alone in the universe?
This signal may or may not contain the answer.
The signal was reportedly first detected in April 2019, recorded in the Parkes Observatory in Australia. However, it was only in 2020 2020 when researchers searched the data and found the curious signal.
“This is the most exciting signal we found in the Breakthrough Listen project, because we have never before jumped a signal through so many of our filters,” Sheikh told Scientific American.
She assists the subsequent analysis of the signal.
“It looks like the signal only appears in our data when we look in the direction of Proxima Centauri, which is exciting,” Sheikh told the New York Times. “This is a threshold that has never been crossed by a signal we’ve seen before, but there are many caveats.”
Although they are hopeful, researchers still point out that the chances of it being something other than earthly interference are very small.
“Our experiment consists of a sea of interfering signals,” Andrew Siemion of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and Breakthrough Listen researcher told the New York Times. “My instinct in the end is that it will be anthropogenic in origin.”
But the signal could not yet be explained, he added.
Scientists first began listening to the stars in 1959, searching for a radio signal that could be sent across our path from a civilization in a distant solar system.
To date, no evidence has been found, and most signals with potential have been ruled out as interference from the earth. But in all those decades, only a tiny fraction of the universe has been searched. It’s like trying to search the ocean for evidence of fish, but just looking for enough water to fill a bath, Wright told PennLive in 2019.
The phrase “these are never strangers” is one that Wright would not like to hear.
“I hate the phrase, because if you say that, why do you look then?” Wright told Scientific American. ‘What we mean by that is that they’ve never been strangers previously. ”