JAKARTA – A signal that had shocked the internet some time ago and was claimed to be an alien turned out to be just interference from radio technology on Earth.
Dubbed the project Breakthrough Listen funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for 100 million US dollars, equivalent to Rp. 1.4 trillion, has been researching radio waves that are claimed to be signs of aliens in 2019. However, in fact it is not an alien.
Signal dubbed Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 or simply BLC1, was detected by the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in Australia, which observed the Proxima Centauri star system at a very large wavelength range in 2019. The observations are known to have been published in a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy recently.
Proxima Centauri is a very interesting star because it has at least one planet orbiting in the habitable zone, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for water on the planet’s surface.
Compiled from New Scientist, Tuesday, October 26, the mysterious signal was first discovered last year by Shane Smith, an undergraduate student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, who worked as a research intern on the project. Breakthrough Listen.
Smith combed through data that Parkes Observatory collected over six days in April and May of the previous year. The telescope has been observing Proxima Centauri for 26 hours. The telescope wasn’t actually hunting for aliens at the time, but instead was monitoring flares on the star’s surface, which could damage the chances of life emerging on nearby planets.
“This is interference man-made radio of some technology, maybe on the surface of the earth,” said one of the authors of the paper, Sofia Sheikh.
The signal did seem quite interesting at first, which led astronomers to search for nearly a year to understand its origins.
During these observations, more than four million radio signal signatures were captured at various wavelengths. One called BLC1 is like a precision radio beam with a frequency of about 982 megahertz, which means its wavelength is about 0.3 meters. It glowed for about 2.5 hours on April 29, 2019, its frequency slowly increased, then disappeared.
Some of the things that make BLC1 special is that the frequency band it covers is very narrow, ruling out all possible astrophysical radio wave sources. No registered transmitter uses that frequency within 1000 kilometers of the observatory, and it lasts much longer than radio signals from planes or satellites passing over the telescope.
Of the millions of signals the Breakthrough Listen team has analyzed so far, BLC1 is the only one that looks completely alien. Once BLC1 was spotted and tagged, the research team then dug through archival observations of the Proxima Centauri system, looking for signals similar to this one.
They found another 60 signals at various frequencies that were otherwise nearly identical to BLC1. All of these signals were still detected as the telescope moved away from Proxima Centauri, indicating that they were generated by human technology near the observatory.
While BLC1 is only detected when the telescope is pointed at the target star system. As a result, the researchers found that it was most likely generated by two interfering man-made radio transmitters.
“Given the haystack of millions of signals, the most likely explanation is the transmission of human technology that happens to be ‘weird’ in a precise way to trick our filters,” Sheikh said.
“We still can’t say with 100 percent certainty that BLC1 is not a signal of alien technology, but the possibility that it is alien is currently unprovable.”
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