“It definitely had me wondering ‘what if?’ for a bit,” says Sheikh. The signal, named BLC1 for ‘Breakthrough Listen candidate 1’, was the first to pass all of the programme’s initial screening tests to rule out obvious sources of interference. “But after a while I started thinking, this is exactly the kind of signal we’re looking for.” “My first thought was that it must be interference, which I guess is a healthy attitude, to be sceptical,” says Price, an astronomer at UC Berkeley and the Breakthrough Listen project scientist in Australia. Smith shared the information with his supervisor, Danny Price, who posted it on a Breakthrough Listen Slack channel, and the team started investigating in earnest. “I did not ever think the signal would cause such excitement.” “I was excited to find a signal that matched all the criteria I was looking for, but I immediately remained sceptical of it and thought there had to be some simple explanation,’ Smith says. The data included more than 4 million signals from the vicinity of the star, but Smith noted one signal near 982 megahertz that seemed to originate from the star itself and lasted for about 5 hours. It was not hunting specifically for aliens at the time, but was instead monitoring flares on the star’s surface, which could hurt the chances for life to arise on nearby planets. The telescope had been making observations in the direction of Proxima Centauri for 26 hours. Smith was combing through data that Parkes collected over six days in April and May the previous year.
The mysterious signal was first spotted last year by Shane Smith, an undergraduate student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, who was working as a research intern with Breakthrough Listen. A sibling initiative to Breakthrough Listen, known as Breakthrough Starshot, aims to send a tiny spacecraft to this planet in the future to look for life there. The star has at least two planets, one of which orbits at the right distance for liquid water to be present on its surface - a prerequisite for life as it exists on Earth 3. Proxima Centauri is of intense interest to SETI researchers, not just because it is nearby. It was detected by the 64-metre Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in southeastern Australia and came from the direction of Proxima Centauri - the nearest star to the Sun, just 1.3 parsecs (4.2 light years) away. The programme has picked up millions of radio blips of unknown origin, nearly all of which could be swiftly classified as coming from radio interference on Earth, from sources such as mobile-phone towers or aircraft radar. Since 2016, Breakthrough Listen has used telescopes around the world to listen for possible broadcasts from alien civilizations.
#How to use pipes planet centauri how to
“We need these candidate signals so we can learn how we will deal with them - how to prove they are extraterrestrial or human-made.” Mysterious blips “It’s really valuable for us to have these dry runs,” says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
It was the first time that data from Breakthrough Listen triggered a detailed search, and the experience puts scientists in a better position to study future candidate detections. “It is human-made radio interference from some technology, probably on the surface of the Earth,” says Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and a co-author of both papers.īut the disturbance, detected by Breakthrough Listen - an ambitious and privately funded US$100-million effort in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) - looked intriguing enough at first that it sent astronomers on a nearly year-long quest to understand its origins. CherneyĪ radio signal detected by an Australian telescope in 2019, which seemed to be coming from the star closest to the Sun, was not from aliens, researchers report today in two papers in Nature Astronomy 1, 2. The 64-metre Parkes Murriyang telescope is one of the facilities involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.
0 kommentar(er)
