No one believes it’s ET phoning, but radio astronomers have admitted they have no explanation for the beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of star Proxima Centauri.
“It’s some kind of technical signal. The question is, is it Earth technology or somewhere outside technology, ”said Sofia Sethe, a Pennsylvania State University graduate student, leading a team studying the signal and trying to explain its origins. It is part of a breakthrough legislation, a 100 million effort funded by Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner to find alien radio waves. The project has now stumbled upon its most interesting salary dirt.
Proxima Centauri is likely to invite “out yards”.
It is the closest known star to the Sun, only 4.24 light-years from Earth, part of a three-star system known as Alpha Centauri. Proxima has at least two planets, one of which is a rocky world slightly larger than Earth that occupies the so-called habitable zone of the star, where the temperature must be favorable for the water on its surface, for the material of life.
The radio signal itself, discovered in spring 2019 to 2019 and previously reported in the Guardian, is in many ways a dream material for alien predators. It was a compressed band signal with a frequency of 982.02 MHz recorded at the Parks Observatory in Australia. Nature, whether it is a scattered star or a geomagnetic storm, broadcasts in many versions.
“When we are looking for the direction of Proxima Centauri, which is exciting, the signal will only appear in our data,” Ms. Sethe said. “It’s a threshold that has never been passed by any of the signals we’ve seen before, but there are a lot of warnings.”
Practitioners in the optimistic realm of outside world intelligence, also known as Seti, say they have seen it all before.
Dan Wertheimer, chief technologist at the Berkeley City Research Center, who was not part of the Proxima Centauri study, said: “We’ve seen this type of signal before, and it’s always turned out to be a radio frequency intervention, RFI. Email.
The idea was echoed by his Berkeley colleague Andrew Simian, who is the chief investigator for Breakthrough Listen. “Our experiment exists in a sea of interfering signals,” he said.
“In the end my instinct is that it will be anthropology at the core,” he added. “But we haven’t been able to fully explain it yet.”
So here, nothing to see. Until then. Despite claims of biosignature gases on Venus and stories of UFO sightings collected by the Pentagon, the search for life, let alone intelligence, there will be a flash of global and historic historical proportions of psychic lightning.
False alarms have been part of the set from the beginning, when Frank Drake, then at Cornell and now retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz, joined the WVA in 1960. A pair of showed a radio telescope in the Green Bank. Tara, hoping to hear the radio waves of aliens. He found out what the signal sounds like. Is it easy for us to know that we are not alone?
It turned out to be a secret military experiment.
Sixty years later we are still officially alone and as an adventurer Setty is going through wars economically and politically, as technology has increased humanity’s ability to lengthen the almost infinite length of planets, stars and “magical frequency” on which they Can broadcast.
In 2015, the Breakthrough Legislation was announced with much fanfare by Mr. Milner and Stephen Hawking, which Dr. Simeon called the Renaissance.
“This is the best time to set,” he said.
The latest excitement began on April 29, 2019, when Breakthrough Lo scientists turned the Parks Radio Telescope on Proxima Centauri to monitor stars for violent flames. It is a small star known as the red dwarf. These stars are prone to such explosions, which can strip the atmosphere of a planet and make it unreliable.
In all, they recorded 26 hours of data. The Parks Radio Telescope, however, was equipped with a new receiver capable of resolving the kind of narrow-band signals that SET researchers are looking for. So, in the fall of 2020, the team decided to find data for such signs, the job fell to Shane Smith, a graduate at Hillsdale College in Michigan and an intern with breakthrough.
The signal that surprised the team appeared five times during a 30-minute Windows series on April 29 in which the telescope was pointed in the direction of Proxima Centauri. He has not appeared since. It was a tone without a pure voice, meaning it seemed to leave no message except the fact of its own existence.
The signal also showed a slight tendency to fluctuate in frequency during 30-minute intervals, an indication that anything that signaled was not on the surface of the earth, but was often associated with a rotating or rotating object.
But the flow does not match the motion of any of the known planets in Proxima Centauri. And in fact the signal, if it is real, is probably coming from somewhere outside the Alpha Centauri system. who knows?
Not showing the next signal “Wow! Signal ”which was printed in 1977 from the Big Ear Radio Telescope operated by Ohio State University. Now retired astronomer Jerry Ahman wrote, “Wow!” When he looked after the fact next to the printout. The signal never reappeared, or was not satisfactorily explained, and some people still wonder if it was a missed call out there.
Regarding the proxima signal, Dr. S. Simian said, “There have been some exclamations, but ‘wow’ is not one of them.”
He laughed when asked what they were.
“Initially there were surprising reactions from experts, but it quickly stabilized,” he said.
Within 24 to 48 hours at the end of this October, he said, the mood shifted from inquisitive and bizarre to “very serious scientific detective work.”
Ms. Sheikh, who is expected to receive a doctorate this summer, is leading the detective work. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, intending to go into particle physics, but she kept going to astronomy instead. She was in search of a new undergraduate research project when she first heard about the Breakdrew Listen project and Setty on Reddit.
“I would say we were very skeptical before, and I will be skeptical,” she said of the putigative signal. But she added that it was “the most interesting sign coming through the Breakthrough Listen program.”
The team hopes to publish its results in early 2021.
The Parks Telescope – once used for communications for Apollo astronauts – is notorious for false alarms. Says Wertheimer. In a recent example, he said, astronomers thought they had discovered a new astrophysical phenomenon.
“It was so exciting until someone noticed the signal only appeared at lunch time,” he said. They were coming from the microwave oven.
Over the years Setti astronomers have boasted of their ability to chase the source of suspicious signals and remove them before the word is made public.
This time his work was reported by The Guardian. “The public wants to know, we get that,” Dr. Simeon said. But, as he and Ms. Sheikh emphasizes, it is not almost complete.
“To be honest, there’s still a lot of analysis that we have to do to be confident that this thing doesn’t interfere.” Ms. Sethe said.
Part of the problem, she explained, is that the original observations were not made in accordance with the standard CTI protocol. Typically, a radio telescope points at a star or other target for five minutes and then “nods” a little over five minutes to see if the signal continues.
In proxima observations, however, the telescope pointed for 30 minutes and then moved around the sky for five minutes (30 degrees or more). Astronomers used star calibration to calibrate. Such a large swing would have taken the telescope away from whatever the source of the radio’s interference was.
If all else fails, Ms. Sheikh said, they will try to reproduce the results again on April 29, 2021, by mimicking the exact movement of the Parks Telescope.
“Because,” she said, “if it really comes from a proxy, then they want to send a hello once a year or something like that.” He added, “But it’s possible that some kind of annual event at the visitor center happens, or something, that causes an environmental impact that doesn’t happen in the rest of the year.”
The target of the proxima signal could pass into a legend like Ohio State Wow. Signal, but Seti always has another day, another star.
“It’s fun, even if the proxima signal interference ends,” said Sukhad Sheikh.
“This is very exciting, even if it comes out of it.”
