Scientists looking for signs of extraterrestrial life usually have their sights set on the sky, asking if anyone is there …
And it seems that a possible answer has arrived.
These are radio broadcasts to 982 mega Hertz recorded from the Parkes telescope, in Australia , and whose frequency seems to come from , consistently, from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a star 4.2 light years from the Sun.
Experts believe it could be a technology firm, also known as a techno-signature, or technosignature, in English.
For decades the biosignatures in space –molecules or biochemical elements such as methane and oxygen that suggest that there is life–, but until recently they were not looking for techno-signatures , elements or traces that would indicate that there is not only life but that there is technology.
The signal “has specific properties that make it comply with several of our filters and we still can’t explain , ”Andrew Siemion, astronomer and principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, told Scientific American.
Breakthrough Listen was set to 2015 with the impulse of the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and with funding from billionaire Yuri Milner.
It is the most formal private project of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (known as SETI for the English search for extraterrestrial intelligence ), and is dedicated to renting for a time the use of radio telescopes around the world to see if it is possible to detect something.
The Signal has been dubbed BLC-1 , an acronym for Breakthrough Listen Candidate-1 , the first candidate for possible technosignature to register the project.
The broadcasts were recorded between April and May d e 2019 for a period of 26 hours of use of the Parkes telescope.
But it was until October 2020 that the people of Breakthrough Listen found among all the information collected the frequency of 982 MHz, which is practically never used for human transmissions.
BLC-1 was recorded for half-hour periods each over five days and only when the telescope was directed towards Proxima.
It was only in December 2019 that it became known that this signal existed, as scientists are finishing their articles for publication in official journals.
A very ‘sign next ‘
Nature usually emits different signals at various frequencies, for reasons that include l Traces of a collapsed star or geomagnetic storms (also called solar storms), such as one that affected Earth in 1859.
On other occasions it has also turned out that signals that have been investigated by those looking for extraterrestrial life were caused by earthly issues such as interference by the passage of a satellite. Signals that confused scientists for decades, signals also recorded by the Parkes telescope, turned out to be caused by a microwave oven.
But until now there is no evidence that this radio wave emission has an earthly or natural origin.
Proxima Centauri is the star outside our solar system closest to it.
[El exjefe de seguridad espacial israelí asegura que los extraterrestres existen]
Proxima is surrounded by at least two planets, one gas and one terrestrial. The second is called Proxima b, discovered in 2016, and is 17% larger than Earth.
It is in what scientists call “habitable zone”: when the distance between a planet and its star is such that temperatures allow there to be water on the surface.
Although the fact that it is possible that there are bodies of water in Proxima b does not mean that there are, especially since NASA discovered in 2017 that the star that serves as its sun emits very intense radiation that could destroy, or have already destroyed, the planetary atmosphere.
Furthermore, the orbit of Proxima b is very short, of 11 days, such that one side of the planet is always light and the other is in perpetual darkness, which makes it difficult to have a sufficiently stable climate.
“We have been searching for alien life for so long now, and l The idea that it could be almost on our doorstep, in the nearest solar system, is a sum of an improbability added to something improbable ”, he said Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster, to The Guardian.
Siemion himself, from Breakthrough Listen, recognized that the signal could well have an anthropogenic origin (created by human beings humans)
“All SETI experiments are done in the middle of a tidal wave of interference, with thousands of signals,” Siemion told National Geographic. “The point is to be able to differentiate between our technology and a distant techno-firm,” he added.
That is why he stressed that the fact that they have not yet managed to establish the possible origin of BLC-1 arouses so much interest.
Siemion highlighted: “The reason why SETI excites us so much, and why we have dedicated our careers to that search, is the same reason why that people of all kinds get excited: aliens, how great! ”.
With information from The Guardian , Scientific American and National Geographic