Eight unexplained radio transmissions that may have been sent by extraterrestrials using technology more advanced than our own have been detected by astronomers. Using cutting-edge deep learning or AI (artificial intelligence), the electromagnetic waves were discovered.
The signals came from five “nearby” stars that are 30 to 90 light years away. In a sea of recordings from more than six years earlier, the pulses were “hiding in plain sight.” To further evaluate the unfathomably vast amount of data, a multinational team created a computer algorithm.
University of Toronto student Peter Ma, the paper’s lead author, said his group combed through 150 TB of data from 820 neighbouring stars. (One terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 Encyclopedia Britannica volumes.) The dataset had previously undergone a conventional approach search in 2017 but was deemed to be devoid of relevant signals. It was gathered by the larger-than-the-Statue-of-Liberty Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative to find extraterrestrial activity. There were no initial “targets of interest” mentioned. The new neural network, however, discovered that this was not the case. A manual re-examination revealed the findings shared a number of essential traits. The transmissions were narrow band, with barely a few Hz for their spectral breadth (Hertz). Broadband phenomena are typical in nature.
According to Dr. Steve Croft, a member of the Breakthrough Listen team from California and one of Ma’s scientific advisors, “the major challenge with any techno-signature search is sifting through this enormous haystack of signals to discover the needle that might be a communication from an alien world.” “Peter’s technique gives us a more efficient way to filter the haystack and locate signals that exhibit the properties we expect from techno-signatures,” says the author.
The data, which were published in the journal Nature Astronomy, were also “sloped,” a sign of acceleration. They also vanished when the instrument pointed away, appearing only when it was focused on a particular celestial source. Information sent between stars can be efficiently sent via radio. It travels 20,000 times faster than our finest rockets through gas and dust, travelling at the speed of light.
Antennas are frequently used in SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) projects to listen in on any signals that aliens might be sending out.
Dr. Cherry Ng, a co-author from the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, said, “These results dramatically illustrate the power of applying modern machine learning and computer vision methods to data challenges in astronomy, resulting in both new detections and higher performance.”
Radio techno-signature science will drastically change if these techniques are applied widely.
The SETI Institute’s COSMIC instrument in New Mexico, where Jodie Foster heard an alien signal in the 1997 film Contact, is where the researchers currently intend to implement the method. It has been looking for “techno-signatures” in 40 million stars.
Technology advancements have made it possible for researchers to gather more data than ever since SETI tests began in 1960 with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma at the same Green Bank Observatory used in this most recent study.
