Breakthrough Listen, a research project developed to search for communications from extraterrestrials in the universe, started in 2016. Since then, he has been a resource for astronomers looking for a different habitat in space, listening to possible alien civilizations using telescopes around the world.
With the Breakthrough Listen project, millions of radio signals of unknown origin have been received, although so far radio interference has been encountered on Earth mostly from sources such as telephone towers and aircraft radar. But in 2019, different radio signals were received that got astronomers excited.
It turned out that the signals were of human origin
In 2019, a group of astronomers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia recorded a very different signal, around 982 megahertz, lasting about 5 hours. The signals were thought to come from Proxima Centauri, the closest solar system to the sun, 4.24 light-years away. A planet in this star system was predicted to be a habitable zone. In fact, a technology startup that works to search for life in space called Breakthrough Starshot aims to send a small spacecraft to this planet in the future. That’s why the aforementioned signal excited the scientific community. The signal looked like a form that space-seeking astronomers call a “techno-signature.” The researchers observed in November 2020, January 2021 and April 2021 to get the signal again. When the obtained data were compared, it was concluded that all signals were interference. As a result of the investigations, it became clear that the signals were of human origin.
With articles published in the journal Nature Astronomy, it was announced that the signal did not come from aliens. “This was probably a human-induced radio interference occurring in technologies on the Earth’s surface,” said Sofia Sheikh, one of the researchers. Jason Wright, an astronomer from Pennsylvania State University, stated that such signals are needed so that one can learn how to deal with aliens. Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, underlined the necessity of conducting such studies and said, “The universe gives us a haystack, we need to find the needle in it and make sure that what we find is a needle. ” said.
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