The Starset SocietyNobody believes it was ET phoning, but radio astronomers admit they don’t have an explanation yet for a beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri.
“It’s some sort of technological signal. The question is whether it’s Earth technology or technology from somewhere out yonder,” said Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University leading a team studying the signal and trying to decipher its origin. She is part of Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million effort funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire investor, to find alien radio waves. The project has now stumbled on its most intriguing pay dirt yet.
Proxima Centauri is an inviting prospect for “out yonder.”
It is the closest known star to the sun, only 4.24 light-years from Earth, part of a triple-star system known as Alpha Centauri. Proxima has at least two planets, one of which is a rocky world only slightly more massive than Earth that occupies the star’s so-called habitable zone, where temperatures should be conducive to water, the stuff of life, on its surface.
The radio signal itself, detected in spring 2019 and reported on earlier in The Guardian, is in many ways the stuff of dreams for alien hunters. It was a narrow-band signal with a frequency of 982.02 MHz as recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Nature, whether an exploding star or a geomagnetic storm, tends to broadcast on a wide range of frequencies.
Read more at The New York Times
