Chinese scientists' claims that their "Sky Eye" telescope could have picked up signals from intelligent aliens have been met with skepticism by an American colleague.
Dan, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence 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 narrowband radio signals he and his fellow researchers found are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials.
Natural sources don't typically produce narrowband 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.
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 Worthier 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," Worthier 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 to 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, Worthier Chinese collaborators were nonetheless cautious to hedge the more sensational remarks, emphasizing the ultimate likelihood that the signals originated on Earth.
"These are several narrowband electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation," Zhang Tongue, 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 narrowband 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, we couldn't figure out what it was for a long time," Worthier said, referring to the microwave lunch incidents. "Finally, somebody figured out they were happening at lunchtime.
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