NASA Just Received the First Ever Alien Signals Coming from Proxima B
Intro After much speculation, NASA has announced
they may have received the first-ever alien signal origination from Proxima B. Located
just 4.2 billion light years away, the Proxima Centauri system has always intrigued astronomers
about its potential habitability.
Let’s take a closer look.
Proxima B Proxima B is an exoplanet that lies just 4.2
light-years away from Earth, a distance that is negligible when taking into consideration
the endless size of the universe.
It is the closest planet outside the Solar system and recent studies have pinpointed
it to be just 17 percent more massive than our planet.
The planet resides in the much-coveted Goldilocks zone of its star.
This means it is in just the right spot to have the possibility of liquid water on its
surface.
Any closer and all the water would evaporate from the heat and being any farther would
cause it all to freeze.
While previously it was thought that the planet was just about 1.3 Earth masses, the new measurements
indicate that the planet may be more like Earth than ever thought before.
The planet was first detected by a spectrograph called High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet
Searcher, but new methods have since allowed scientists to have an ultra-precise view of
the planet.
The planet orbits around Proxima Centauri which happens to be the closest star to the
Sun and since it sits in the habitable zone of this star, scientists speculate it could
be home to microscopic or even intelligent life.
While the planet enjoys a terrestrial terrain similar to the Earth, there are some ways
it is significantly different from our planet as well.
For one, scientists believe that the planet is tidally locked and in a synchronous rotation
with its star.
This means that one side of the planet is always facing the star while the other is
always facing away.
Additionally, Proxima Centauri is much smaller, and much dimmer compared to the Sun.
Since the planet sits relatively close to its star, some researchers believe it may
not have an atmosphere.
This is because the radiation coming from Proxima Centauri might have stripped away
the planet's air, making it impossible for its surface to harbor liquid water.
However, all these questions may be definitively answered once the new technology is available
to inspect the planet at a much more intimate level.
New Detection Astronomers searching for signs of life beyond
Earth have spotted something strange.
An as-yet unexplained radio signal appears to be coming from the direction of Proxima
Centauri.
Adding to the excitement, at least two planets orbit this star, one of which might be temperate
and rocky like Earth.
Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long search for alien broadcasts from the nearest million
stars, was using Australia's Parkes Observatory to study Proxima Centauri when the team detected
the conspicuous signal, which they dubbed BLC-1.
The radio waves were picked up in observations made between April and May 2019.
Though many scientists strongly suspect that the signal is human in origin, BLC-1 is the
most tantalizing detection Breakthrough has made so far in its search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, or SETI.
The team is preparing two papers describing the signal and follow-up analysis, which isn't
yet complete.
While researchers continue to analyze the signal—and experts caution that there is
almost certainly an ordinary, terrestrial explanation—even a remote hint of life beyond
Earth has people excited.
Scientists have been scanning the skies for radio signals that could be artificial in
origin for 60 years—starting with Project Ozma, a search conducted in 1960.
Unlike radio waves the cosmos produces naturally, these whispers from extraterrestrials are
expected to look a lot like the transmissions humans use to communicate.
Such signals would cover a very narrow range of radio frequencies.
They would also have a characteristic "drift" indicating that the source is moving toward
or away from Earth—a clue that the radio source is coming from a distant cosmic object,
such as a planet orbiting a star.
Scientists believe that only human technology seems to produce signals like that, such as
things like Wi-Fi, cell towers, GPS, and satellite radio.
All of these produce signals exactly like the ones they are searching the cosmos for,
which makes it very hard to tell if something is from outer space or human-generated technology.
Over the decades, astronomers have detected numerous candidate signals.
Some turned out to come from previously unknown astronomical sources such as pulsars, the
rapidly rotating corpses of dead stars that beam radio waves into the cosmos.
The first known fast radio bursts—brief blasts of radio waves that are still somewhat
mysterious—initially seemed as though they could be artificial signals.
Signals called perytons, which are less energetic bursts of radio emission, also raised eyebrows
until scientists determined their origin: a microwave oven.
BLC-1 could be beaming from an object that isn’t transmitting as expected: a satellite
that hasn’t been identified yet, a plane traveling overhead, a transmitter on the ground
near the telescope’s line of sight, or perhaps something even more mundane, like faulty electronics
in a nearby building or a passing car.
And then there are the signals that astronomers haven’t been able to definitively pin to
a natural source, such as the famous “WOW!”
signal picked up by the Ohio State University Radio Observatory, colloquially known as Big
Ear, in 1977.
This extremely bright barrage of radio waves initially looked like a real SETI detection,
but no one has been able to verify it or find it again.
Strange Signal In 2015, Breakthrough Listen kicked off a
decade-long search funded by Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner, and so far, the team
hasn't found anything definitive in their scans of the skies.
Starting in April 2019, Breakthrough aimed the Parkes telescope at Proxima Centauri—not
necessarily because scientists were searching for aliens, but because they were hoping to
better understand the gargantuan flares that small red dwarf stars like Proxima frequently
emit.
While processing those observations this summer, Shane Smith, an undergraduate from Hillsdale
College in Michigan working with Breakthrough, spotted BLC-1 radiating from the star.
Although the signal is faint, BLC-1 passed all the tests the Breakthrough team uses to
filter out the millions of signals generated by humans: It was narrow in bandwidth, appeared
to drift in frequency, and disappeared when the telescope shifted its gaze from Proxima
to a different object.
Over the following days, four similar signals appeared, although some have been ruled out
as radio interference.
According to astronomers, if BLC-1 is, against all odds, a postcard from the star system
next door, then statistically speaking the Milky Way must be stuffed with communicating
civilizations.
In this case, there would be more than a half-billion societies out there in our galaxy.
Since the detection, the team has again observed Proxima Centauri—and found nothing.
Scientists are working on developing new tests that could pinpoint the signal's origin, including
continuing to aim the Parkes telescope at Proxima.
Scientists from the SETI Institute are already in the process of creating new tests and diligently
working to confirm the signal's origin is a natural part of the SETI endeavor and one
that everyone can learn and benefit from.
The team has stated that evaluating BLC-1 has taught them a lot about testing their
data.
Follow-up observations of Proxima Centauri will be valuable for understanding how such
stars behave—as well as for achieving a comprehensive SETI search of a nearby star
system with known planets, even if it isn't populated by technologically savvy aliens.
Researchers say that even if this signal is most likely interference from human technology,
the process of identifying it has made them better at searching for such signals in the
future.
The researchers scanned Proxima Centauri across a frequency range of 700 megahertz to 4 gigahertz,
with a resolution of 3.81 hertz.
This is the equivalent of tuning to more than 800 million radio channels at a time, with
exquisite sensitivity.
Using the Parkes Telescope in Australia, one of the largest telescopes in the Southern
Hemisphere, since 2016 scientists have detected more than 4.1 million "hits," or frequency
ranges that had signs of potentially significant radio signals.
However, upon subsequent analysis, the vast majority of such hits usually turned out to
be emissions from human technology here on Earth.
Specifically, the researchers looked for radio signals that may have come from Proxima Centauri
based on two main criteria.
First, they looked at whether the signal was changing steadily in frequency over time.
A transmitter on a distant planet is expected to move concerning whatever telescope on Earth
detects it, leading to a Doppler shift in frequency, akin to how ambulance sirens sound
higher-pitched as the vehicle drives toward you and lower-pitched as it moves away.
Rejecting hits with no such hints of motion reduced the number of hits from about 4.1
million to about 1 million.
Second, the researchers determined whether the remaining hits appeared to come from the
direction of Proxima Centauri.
To determine this, the telescope pointed in the direction of the star and then pointed
away, repeating this "on-off" pattern several times.
A candidate techno signature should appear only in the "on" observation, when the telescope
was looking toward the star, whereas local sources are expected to have both "on" and
"off" observations.
After scientists applied both these filters, they next visually inspected the remaining
5,160 candidates to weed out common mistakes.
For example, sometimes a faint signal was visible in the "off" observations but was
not quite strong enough for the automated data analysis software to detect.
The remaining signal of interest persisted for more than two hours of observations and
appeared to be present only in "on" observations from Proxima Centauri.
Scientists think BLC1 is most likely an extreme example of local interference, in the sense
that its properties are very different from other interferences, and it thus could mimic
a Bonafide techno signature.
The project will continue monitoring Proxima Centauri and keep refining its algorithms
to improve its ability to discriminate between real and false signals.
The field of techno signature science has matured to the point where sufficient technical
expertise exists to investigate putative signals in great detail, and the data are of a high
enough quality to do so rigorously.
The successful detection and investigation of BLC1 are indicative of a dramatic expansion
of observational capability in SETI searches.
In the future, upcoming radio telescopes such as MeerKAT in South Africa and the Very Large
Array (VLA) in the southwest United States will offer new and powerful ways to reject
interference and improve our sensitivity.
Astronomers say they are already well along in deploying new SETI systems on MeerKAT and
VLA, and when they are fully online, they will allow them to observe millions of stars
per year between them.
Outro If you liked this video, you may also be interested
in this one which talks about NASA’s impossible discovery of a new planet in our Solar system.
Do you think the signal from Proxima B may have been created by an advanced alien civilization?
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