The mystery of proxima centauri Alien Signal has been solved
From what many thought it was, to what it was revealed to be, and more!
Join us as we reveal to you how the mystery of proxima centauri signal has been solved!
It's safe to say that one of the biggest things that astronomers both big and small do is
go and observe space as a whole and try to determine certain things based on what we
see, and hear.
Yes, hear, because there are many groups out there that are dedicated towards listening
to the "signals of space" and then determining their origin.
And that's what brings us to the mystery that has been brewing for a year near proxima centauri.
You see, last year, a signal was found near that section of space, and it got a lot of
people talking.
The mysterious signals were first detected by the Breakthrough Listen project, which
hunts for evidence of alien "technosignatures" — radio waves and other evidence of extraterrestrial
technology.
The initiative uses some of the largest radio telescopes in the world to capture data across
broad swaths of the radio spectrum in the direction of a wide range of celestial targets.
One of Breakthrough Listen's targets is Proxima Centauri.
The star, located slightly more than 4 light-years from Earth, is a red dwarf orbited by two
known exoplanets.
If that area of space sounds famliar.
It's because one of those two exoplanets is felt to be the "best shot" at colonization
outside of our solar system currently.
Mainly because it is within the "habitable zone" of its star, and thus is a viable candidate
towards not just going there, but living there.
Obviously, if we were to find alien signals from that place, that could go and change
everything, including not just our plans for colonization, but how we would interact with
this potentially foreign signal.
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, the researchers noted.
Using the Parkes Telescope in Australia, one of the largest telescopes in the Southern
Hemisphere, since 2016 the 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 at Earth.
But of course, the question then becomes, how would we know about which is which?
What might be an alien signal and what is our own technology mucking up the works, right?
Well, they went and focused on two areas to break down just how it would all go.
First, they looked at whether the signal was changing steadily in frequency over time.
A transmitter on a distant planet is expected to move with respect to 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 technosignature 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.
"Searching for technosignatures is a rigorous and deliberative scientific endeavor that
demands attention to detail and a high degree of skepticism," astrophysicist Andrew Siemion
at the University of California, Berkeley, the principal investigator of Breakthrough
Listen, told Space.com.
The remaining signal of interest, dubbed BLC1, persisted for more than two hours of observations
and appeared to be present only in "on" observations from Proxima Centauri.
"BLC1 represents the best candidate signal we have had in the Listen program since beginning
the program in 2015," Siemion said.
The scientists detailed their findings in two studies online Oct. 25 in the journal
Nature Astronomy.
So then the work on whether BLC1 was the real "alien signal" began, and many people weighed
in on the matter and poured over the data so that people could see the truth, no matter
what it was.
And to that end, it was revealed that the signal, though unique in its own way, was
indeed a signal that was from Earth instruments: "This signal, even though it was generated
by human radio frequency interference, was uniquely similar to the kind of signal we
would expect from space," Astronomer Sofia Sheikh told Space.com.
"It fooled our algorithms to screen out radio frequency interference, and it took months
for us to perform the analysis and gather the data to understand that it was human-generated.
A signal-of-interest has never been scrutinized this thoroughly in the history of SETI (search
for extraterrestrial intelligence), so it's ground-breaking in that way."
To be fair, they didn't find the exact source of the signal, but it was clear to them that
it was indeed something man-made in origin despite it "coming from" Proxima Centauri.
And should you not believe their findings for one reason or another, they're making
their findings and research public so that you can look over it yourself and see if you
come to the same conflusions: "The field of technosignature 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," one of
the team leads said.
"The successful detection and investigation of BLC1 is indicative of a dramatic expansion
of observational capability in SETI searches."
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So, when you hear that this "possible alien signal" was just nothing more than manmade
"nonsense", you'd think that this would be a big debunker of the "aliens are out there"
theory, right?
Well...not exactly.
An inherent challenge in searching for alien communications is that no one knows how aliens
might communicate, and no one knows all the potential natural sources of radio waves in
the universe.
So when signals arrive that seem even plausibly technological and don't come with easy natural
explanations, it's tempting to make the jump to aliens.
Especially when it comes from a place that we THINK doesn't have aliens, and yet it has
this signal or interference.
And to be fair, while they did think it may have been an alien signal at first, they do
go and fix that line of thinking by doing the work, finding the errors, and eventually,
discovering that it was indeed a man-made signal.
That's good on the level that it means that we can figure out these things, and that now
we can go and refine the technologies we have so that this kind of "false alarm" if you
will won't happen again.
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," one astronomer said.
"We are already well along in deploying new SETI systems on MeerKAT and VLA, and when
they are fully online, we will be observing millions of stars per year between them."
"While we were unable to conclude a genuine technosignature, we are increasingly confident
that we have the necessary tools to detect and validate such signatures if they exist,"
Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said in a statement.
And that's a big deal if you can't tell.
Because for the longest of times, a lot of these signals were mysteries that we could
listen to, but not exactly solve, and if you can't tell, that's a big problem.
But, even with this 'setback', the teams behind these projects and data proved that we are
able to go and determine what may be a real mysterious signal, and what is just interference
or an accidentally caught man-made signal.
Every little bit helps in cases like this.
Furthermore, that doesn't mean that there are no mysterious signals out there right
now, because there are.
Scientists have encountered a signal that is very much like a repeating radio signal.
Something that is found in space more often than you might think.
But the reason that this one has may people stumped is that it is an energy signature
that has never been detected before.
Just as important, the energy source is extremely finicky, appearing bright in the radio spectrum
for weeks at a time and then completely vanishing within a day.
Why is that something of note?
Because the various "celestial bodies" of the universe that we know about have been
studied at length for signals and energy patterns like this...and yet...not a signal one of
them match-up to what this repeating signal is doing at the Milky Way core.
The radio source — known as ASKAP J173608.2−321635 — was detected with the Australian Square
Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback.
This signal is very intriguing to the teams that found it because of its variable nature,
as well as how it doesn't seem to have been detected before until the Pathfinder picked
it up.
What's more, it never lasted too long "in the sky" before fading out again, and yet
it does repeat itself in certain ways.
Now, we do know that there are certain signals that come from the cores of galaxies such
as the Milky Way.
They are object known as a galactic center radio transient (GCRT), a rapidly glowing
radio source that brightens and decays near the Milky Way's center, usually over the course
of a few hours.
The reason that it hasn't been identified as this is simple.
There have only been three cases of a GCRT recorded and they don't match up to this mysterious
repeating signal that has been found.
Hence, it is a mystery signal, and one that many people are trying to figure out for obvious
reasons.
Because what could truly cause a signal like this in the middle of a literal galaxy?
Not many things should it be a "natural" source and not another man-made one.
That's not to say it couldn't be another case of man-made interference, but at present,
it isn't pointing to that.
And that is why these listening teams are out there, observing the data and trying to
collect sounds from space.
Because despite what we'd like to believe at times, we know precious little about all
that really goes on out there in space.
We're still finding new planets, new stars, new phenomenon that we don't know anything
about.
We're still locating signals that we don't know the origins to and have to dig deep to
find out the truth.
As to whether we'll fully figure out space as a whole, well, space is a big place.
So it's going to take a lot of time and hard work to get even close.
But if we DO get to that point...well...let's just wait and see what happens next, ok?
Thanks for watching, everyone!
What did you think of this look at the signals that have been caught out in space, and whether
they were really alien signals, or just something from man?
Does hearing about these signals intrigue you in a certain way?
Do you hope that we do indeed find a signal that might just be from an alien race?
Let us know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe and we'll see you next time on
the channel!