Breakthrough Listen, an initiative backed by celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner, is a project that studies extraterrestrial signals in the universe to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a research group from the project has found 11 strange signals after studying 692 stars.
According to Phys.org, the details can be found on the Breakthrough Listen website and the study paper awaits publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The group of scientists, based at the University of California’s Berkeley SETI Research Center, has informed that they have found 11 signals to be worthy of a closer look. However, at the same time, the group does not believe that any of the signals are traces of alien communications.
The project members have also noted that the sifting process of data is simple and straight forward. The 1st step includes differentiating natural signals from artificial signals by observing unbalanced activities like modulation and pulsing patterns. The next step include confirming that any indiscretions do not have a source on Earth. Amazingly, the software is an open source so anyone can participate in the search if they want to.
The research group gathered numerous petabytes of data after studying 692 stars with telescopes, with each getting 3-5 minute observations. As of now, the group members have identified 1,709 stars for investigation. The scientists have also sectionalized the stars into 2 categories. One group includes some branch stars no more than 163 light-years away as well as a sample spread across a main sequence, and the other includes stars within 16 light-years from the Sun.
Dr. Andrew Siemion of BSRC said that “With the submission of this paper, the 1st scientific results from Breakthrough Listen are now available for the world to review, although the search has not yet found a considerable signal from alien intelligence, these are early days.”