The Mystery Behind a Nearby Alien Beacon Is Solved
Back in April 2019, an Australian telescope picked up a very tantalizing radio signal that seemed to emanate from the sun's closest neighboring star. The signal didn’t have any obvious explanation. Instead, it seemed to possess the hallmarks of something created by intelligent alien life.
And in fact, that was the whole point of the research project that stumbled on the signal. Called Breakthrough Listen, the $100 million effort has spent the last five years using state-of-the-art telescopes around the world to listen in on signs of extraterrestrial life from around the galaxy.
The 2019 signal, called “blc1,” was exactly what the Breakthrough researchers were hoping to find. Detected by the Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in southeastern Australia, blc1 was coming right from Proxima Centauri, a star just 4.2 light-years away, and home to two planets—one of which is thought to be potentially habitable to life.
According to Sofia Sheikh from the Berkeley SETI Research Center, the signal was “uniquely similar to the kind of signal we would expect from space.” It was something that could only be made by technology—and technology from space to boot. It lasted several hours, which ruled out satellites or aircraft. If it had a natural origin, the signal should have repeated over time, but the team never observed it again in dozens of hours of follow-up observations of Proxima Centauri. Instead, it was the type of one-and-done signal expected from an intelligent civilization.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-blc1-alien-radio-signal-from-proxima-centauri-found-by-breakthrough-listen-finally-gets-explained?ref=home
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