Researchers in the Breakthrough Listen project have detected a curious signal from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The signal has been designated as a possible alien transmission, but, like so many examples from the past, this latter detection is probably another dead end.
Scientists in the $ 100 million Breakthrough Listen project, funded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, are working on a research paper that describes this signal, but News of the leak was somehow leaked to The Guardian last week. With the cat out of the bag comfortably, details about the strange signal now appear, but supporting data is still unavailable.
This is what we know.
The narrowband radio signal, which was found at 982,001 MHz, was picked up by the 210-foot radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, as Scientific American reports. The emission appeared to originate from Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf located 4.2 light-years away. The system houses two known exoplanets, one of which, Proxima Centauri b, resides in the habitable zone. Interestingly, the frequency of the signal drifted slightly. It could be a Doppler shift caused by the movement of the source, such as an exoplanet in orbit.
The Breakthrough Listen team, led by Andrew Siemion of the University of California at Berkeley, was not looking for aliens at the time. Rather, they were looking for signs of flares from the red dwarf, as these gusts could adversely affect the habitability of the Proxima Centauri system. These data were collected in April and May 2019, but the signal was not detected until recently. Shane Smith, a student at Hillside College in Michigan and an intern at the SETI project in Berkeley, found the signal while performing a routine review of the value of 30 hours of data, according to SciAm (imagine it turned out to be alien; Smith would ) to instantly become the most legendary fellow in history).
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The broadcast appears to be a one-time event, appearing only once in the dataset. With no obvious source for the signal, the team has labeled it as BLC-1, i.e. the advanced listening of Candidate 1. This is the first official signal for the ten-year project, which was released in 2015. Astrophysicist Sofia Sheikh of Penn State University is the lead author of the next paper, which is expected in early 2021, SciAm reports.
There is a small probability that the signal is produced by an extraterrestrial intelligence, either an incidental radio leak or a specific transmission designed to catch our attention (i.e. a possible technosignature). In fact, the researchers at Breakthrough Listen themselves fully expect BLC-1 to be no strangers. As Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, told SciAm, “it’s like 99.9%” non-aliens.
It is important to note that ground interference, such as microwave or some other distraction, has not yet been ruled out as a possible source of radio broadcast. BLC-1 leads in 1977 WOW! signal to the mind, which was not repeated either, making it difficult for scientists to study (recent research suggests that it came from a hydrogen cloud caused by quotes).
BLC-1 is unlikely to come from foreigners for various reasons.
First, BLC-1 appears to be an unmodulated signal. It’s a boring, unalterable tone. If aliens tried to contact us, they would surely make the message a little more interesting, like conveying a sequence of eye-catching prime numbers, as shown in Carl Sagan Contact. The unmodulated nature of the signal also makes it a poor candidate for incidental radio leaks.
In addition, the space is absolutely full of all kinds of natural radio signals. A natural source of BLC-1 is not immediately obvious, but scientists will have to rule out things like our Sun, Jupiter, neutron stars and pulsars, supernova remnants, radio galaxies, and so on.
Terrestrial sources should also be discarded, along with orbiting satellites, as explained by Seth Shostak, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute. publish:
In fact, it could only be a telemetry signal from an orbiting satellite. The orbital motion of these satellites causes their transmissions to increase and decrease in frequency, after all. And while you may think that the chances of accidentally tuning a satellite aren’t great, you should think about it again. There are over 2,700 buzzing satellites in operation on our planet, providing weather information, Google Earth images, GPS signals for navigation, and high-resolution photos for the military, just to name a few. This flood of hardware information a few hundred miles above our heads is obviously important to a high-tech lifestyle, but it greatly tightens the spectrum of radio. SETI scientists are trying to find a needle in a pile of pines.
It is also important to note that the Proxima Centauri system is a very poor candidate for extraterrestrial life, as the star is a red dwarf. How research shows, red dwarfs are subjected to frequent and powerful solar flares, making it difficult for the appearance and evolution of life around them. The exoplanet Proxima Centauri b is so close to its host star that it takes only 11 days to complete a single orbit.
And then there’s the whole likelihood of it all. The chances of Proxima Centauri — the closest star to our solar system — hosting an intelligent civilization is so tremendously unlikely that I lack the right adjectives to describe how highly unlikely it is. If our nearest neighbor is inhabited by aliens and precisely at the same time we are around, that means the rest of the galaxy must be full of life. We cannot accept this conclusion, however, given Fermi’s great silence and paradox. In fact, if life is ubiquitous in both time and space, we would have already seen signs of aliens (more on this topic here, here, here, i here).
This is not to say that the Breakthrough Listen team is wrong in considering aliens as a possible source of BLC-1. They are absolutely right in doing so, as there is still no good explanation to explain the strange broadcast. To move forward, radio astronomers would have to train their telescopes at Proxima Centauri in hopes of repeating them, while other scientists would have to investigate possible sources of the strange signal. We just have to be patient and not come to conclusions, as is our tendency.
Correction: An earlier version of this article gave the wrong year for WOW! signal.