Breakthrough Listen Project Discovers 11 Strange Signals Coming From Beyond Earth

Breakthrough Listen, an initiative backed by celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner, is a project that investigates extraterrestrial signals in the universe to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a research team 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 team of researchers, based at the University of California’s Berkeley SETI Research Center, has reported that they have found 11 signals to be worthy of a closer look. However, at the the same time, the team 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 straightforward and simple. The first step involves differentiating artificial signals from natural signals by observing irregular behavior like pulsing patterns or modulation. The next step revolves around ensuring that any irregularities do not have an origin on Earth. Incidentally, the software is an open source so anyone can take part in the search if they want to.

The research team collected several petabytes of data after studying 692 stars with telescopes, with each getting three 5-minute observations. As of now, the project members have identified 1,709 stars for analysis. The researchers have also sectionalized the stars into two categories. One group includes stars within 16 light-years from the Sun, and the other includes some branch stars no more than 163 light-years away as well as a sample spread across a main sequence.

“With the submission of this paper, the first scientific results from Breakthrough Listen are now available for the world to review,” Dr. Andrew Siemion of BSRC said, according to Deccan Chronicle. “Although the search has not yet found a convincing signal from alien intelligence, these are early days.”