![]() ![]() Ultimately, the signal’s origin appears tightly constrained within a 16′-wide circle - roughly half the size of the Full Moon - around Proxima Centauri on the sky.īreakthrough Listen employs software filters that reject the cacophony of signals originating from Earth or Earth-orbiting satellites to isolate those coming from deep space. Notably, when the telescope was turned away from the star, the signal vanished. In late October 2020, Breakthrough Listen intern Shane Smith, an undergraduate at Hillsdale College, found a narrowband transmission at a frequency of 982.002 megahertz - in a portion of the radio spectrum rarely used by human-made transmitters - buried in the data.Īlthough the press reports are a bit unclear on exactly how and when Parkes detected the signal, it apparently showed up during five 30-minute periods over several days, all while the telescope was pointing directly at Proxima. But the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project, the world’s most advanced SETI endeavor, was piggybacking on the observations to simultaneously search for alien signals. Notably, this feeble star has at least two planets, one of which is a super-Earth with at least 1.17 Earth masses that orbits in the star’s habitable zone - the region around a star where a planet with the right conditions could host liquid water on its surface.Īstronomers were using Parkes to catch radio emission from powerful flares shooting off the star. The 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia picked up the faint signal in April and May 2019 while observing Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.25 light-years from Earth. Since then, however, the discovery team has remained tight-lipped about the signal.īut the information revealed to date is intriguing. Researchers subsequently granted interviews to Scientific American and National Geographic. ![]() The discovery was leaked to the British newspaper The Guardian, which reported the story December 18. More likely, it’s much ado about nothing. It could turn out to be the real deal - a calling card from another civilization. An enigmatic radio signal from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, has set the internet ablaze with rumor and speculation. ![]()
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