Have aliens finally contacted us? Yes, if a Chinese claim is to be believed. China's state-backed Science and Technology Daily made the claim and then deleted it, reported Bloomberg. As per the report, the signals were detected by Sky Eye, largest radio telescope in the world. Ther news in Science and Technology Daily reportedly cited Zhang Tonjie, a scientist, who said that the signal was different from the previous ones and the team was analysing it.
Zhang Tonjie is a chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
It is not yet clear why the report was published and then deleted. The daily is official newspaper of China's China’s science and technology ministry. The news started avid discussion on the web nonetheless. The topic was discussed on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.
Sky Eye, the largest radio telescope on Earth is located in China's Guizhou province. It has a diameter 500 metres (1,640 feet). It officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life in September 2020.
Finally they say that's an experiment,
Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project(opens in new tab) which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials."
Natural sources don't typically produce narrow-band radio signals. Scientists picked up three of these signals, seemingly from space, in 2019 and 2022 using the largest radio telescope in the world — the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), nicknamed "Sky Eye," which was performing a preliminary scan of exoplanets in preparation for an upcoming five-year-long sky survey.
One FAST official who was not directly involved in the research also said that an extraterrestrial origin for the signals was "likely."
The claims quickly went viral, spreading across Chinese state media and the Chinese social media platform Weibo before being reported by the international press and Live Science. But Werthimer says that, while the signals are certainly artificial, they're almost definitely from humans and not aliens.
"The big problem, and the problem in this particular case, is that we're looking for signals from extraterrestrials, but what we find is a zillion signals from terrestrials," Werthimer told Live Science. "They're very weak signals, but the cryogenic receivers on the telescopes are super sensitive and can pick up signals from cell phones, television, radar and satellites — and there are more and more satellites in the sky every day. If you're kind of new in the game, and you don't know all these different ways that interference can get into your data and corrupt it, it's pretty easy to get excited."
In spite of this excitement, Werthimer's Chinese collaborators were nonetheless cautious to hedge the more sensational remarks, emphasizing the ultimate likelihood that the signals originated on Earth.
"These are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation," Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, said in the report. "The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed and ruled out. This may be a long process."
The recent false alarm is one of several instances in which alien-hunting scientists have been misled by noise from human activity. In 2019, astronomers spotted a signal beamed to Earth from Proxima Centauri — the nearest star system to our sun (sitting roughly 4.2 light-years away) and home to at least one potentially habitable planet. The signal was a narrow-band radio wave typically associated with human-made objects, which led scientists to entertain the thrilling possibility that it came from alien technology. Studies released two years later, however, suggested that the signal was most likely produced by malfunctioning human equipment, Live Science previously reported. Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 2011 and 2014, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches.
"A lot of very sophisticated astronomers looked at that and we couldn't figure out what it was for a long time," Werthimer said, referring to the microwave lunch incidents. "Finally, somebody figured out they were happening at lunchtime."
Radio interference is a big problem for a telescope like FAST precisely because of its scale and sensitivity. The 1,600-foot-diameter (500 meters) dish is powerful enough to detect radio devices like those on Earth operating many light-years away, and the data it captures contains just under 40 billion observations per second. In this setup, picking up a false positive is a lot like flipping a coin to get twenty heads in a row, Werthimer told the publication Futurism(opens in new tab) — it may seem like a remarkable outcome on its own, but not when the coin has been flipped trillions of times or more.
And the less history a given research team has with a particular radio telescope, the more likely it is that they won't spot a subtle interference effect. According to Werthimer, the FAST telescope's receiver can look at 19 different places in the sky at once. Scientists are used to ruling out interference if it shows up in all 19, but if the interference only appears in one (as it did with all three of the supposedly "alien" signatures detected in this case) even experienced researchers can be led astray.
With the ever-increasing numbers of satellites orbiting above our heads, Werhimer says this problem will only get worse.
"100 years ago, we didn't really know how to do SETI. 100 years from now, I don't think we'll be able to do it from the ground," Werthimer said. "This may be a unique window in our history as Earthlings where we can do pretty good SETI searches, where not all of the possible radio bands are corrupted by our own signals.
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