Researchers with 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 extraterrestrial transmission, but like many examples in the past, this latest detection is probably another deadlock.
Scientists with the $ 100 million Breakthrough Listen project, funded by Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, are currently working on a research paper describing this signal, but news The detection somehow leaked to The Guardian last week. With the cat comfortably out of the bag, details about the strange signal now appear, but supporting data remains unavailable.
Here’s what we know.
The narrowband radio signal, 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 appears to have come from Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf located 4.2 light-years away. The system hosts two known exoplanets, one of which, Proxima Centauri b, is in the habitable zone. Interestingly, the frequency of the signal drifted so easily. This could be a Doppler change caused by the motion of the source, such as an orbiting exoplanet.
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 missiles from the red dwarf, as these explosions could negatively affect the home in the Proxima Centauri system. These data were collected in April and May 2019, but the signal was not observed until recently. Shane Smith, a student at Hillside College in Michigan and an intern in Berkeley’s SETI project, found the signal while performing a routine 30-hour data review, according to SciAm (imagine if it turns out to be aliens – Smith would have instantly become the most legendary trainee in history).
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The show appears to be a unique event that occurs only once in the dataset. Without an obvious source for the signal, the team labeled BLC-1, Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1. This is the first official signal candidate for the 10-year project, which was launched in 2015. Astrophysicist Sofia Sheikh of Penn State University will be the author main of the future work, which is expected in early 2021, as reported by SciAm.
There is very little chance that the signal will be produced by an extraterrestrial intelligence, whether it is accidental radio leaks or a targeted transmission designed to attract our attention (ie a possible tehnosemnatura). Indeed, the Breakthrough Listen researchers themselves fully expect BLC-1 not to be aliens. As Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, told SciAm, “it’s like 99.9%” not aliens.
Importantly, ground interference, as a microwave oven or another distraction, has not yet been ruled out as a possible source of radio broadcast. BLC-1 brings 1977 WOW! signal in the mind, which also failed to repeat itself, making it difficult for scientists to study (recent research suggests that it comes from a hydrogen cloud caused by comets).
That BLC-1 came from aliens is unlikely for several reasons.
First, BLC-1 appears to be an unmodulated signal. It’s a boring, unchanging tone. If aliens tried to contact us, it would certainly make the message a little more interesting, such as transmitting a sequence of attention-grabbing prime numbers, as described in Carl Sagan. Contact. The unmodulated nature of the signal also makes it a weak candidate for accidental radio leaks.
Also, the space is absolutely filled with all kinds of natural radio signals. A natural source for 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 will also have to be excluded, along with orbiting satellites, as Seth Shostak, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute, explained in a recent post:
Indeed, it could just be a telemetry signal from an orbiting satellite. The orbital motion of these satellites causes their transmissions to increase and decrease in frequency, eventually. And while you may think that the chances of accidentally tuning a satellite aren’t high, you should think again. There are more than 2,700 satellites in operation buzzing our planet, providing weather information, images for Google Earth, GPS signals for navigation and high-resolution photos for the military, to name a few. This flow of information from the hardware a few hundred kilometers above our heads is obviously important for a high-tech lifestyle, but it blocks the radio spectrum a lot. SETI scientists are trying to find a needle in a pile of needles.
It is also important to point out that the Proxima Centauri system is a very weak candidate for extraterrestrial life, given that the star is a red dwarf. As research shows, red dwarfs are subject to frequent and strong solar flares, which makes it difficult to appear and evolve life around them. The exoplanet Proxima Centauri b is so close to its host star that it only takes 11 days to complete a single orbit.
And then there is the whole plausibility of all. The odds of Proxima Centauri – the closest star to our solar system – hosting an intelligent civilization is so brutally unlikely that I lack the proper adjectives to describe how brutal it is unlikely. If our closest neighbor is inhabited by aliens and at the same time we are around, that means the rest of the galaxy must be full of life. However, we cannot accept this conclusion, given the Great Silence and the Fermi Paradox. Indeed, if life is ubiquitous in both time and space, we should have seen signs of aliens by now (more on this topic here, here, here, and here).
This does not mean that the Breakthrough Listen team is wrong when they consider aliens as a possible source of BLC-1. They are absolutely right to do this, because there is still no good explanation to explain the strange show. Going forward, radio astronomers should train their telescopes on the Proxima Centauri in hopes of a repeat, while other scientists should investigate possible sources of the strange signal. We just have to be patient and not draw conclusions, as is our tendency.
Correction: An earlier version of this article gave the wrong year for WOW! signal.