Participants in the international Breakthrough Listen project studied radio waves emanating from the 820 star systems closest to us, RT reports.
And they immediately discovered 8 candidate stars to be radio signals likely to result from extraterrestrial civilizations. The results of the astronomers’ study were published in an article in the journal Nature Astronomy.
And the article stated: “We have put in place an artificial intelligence system that allows the search for signals likely to be emitted by advanced civilizations with high technology within radio waves, and we were able to sort out 8 unique signals received from extraterrestrials that astronomers had not previously observed, and no evidence has been made of them.” of those signals during the following repeated observations.
At the end of July 2015, Russian businessman Yuri Milner and the late British cosmologist Stephen Hawking launched the Breakthrough Listen project as part of a program of paranormal initiatives aimed at searching for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Under the aforementioned program, Milner allocated $100 million to create a network of radio telescopes aimed at searching for so-called “technical fingerprints” of artificial cosmic signals.
In order to search for “technological fingerprints”, a group of astronomers led by the Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives Program, Peter Fordin, developed an artificial intelligence system capable of “sifting through” the huge amount of data collected by the Breakthrough Listen observatories. The work of this algorithm was tested by scientists on data collected since 2016 while observing the nearest 820 stars using the US GBT radio telescope.
In total, astronomers monitored each of these stars for about 480 hours, during which all radio signals emitted from these stars were recorded and analyzed in a special way using an artificial intelligence system that automatically filters out all natural signals and interferences resulting from terrestrial objects and satellites orbiting them. , and records only those emissions of radio waves that are potentially of an artificial nature.
During the entire period of observing these stars, Breakthrough Listen participants were able to simultaneously record eight radio signals, consistent with “technical fingerprinting” criteria, that were from five nearby stars HIP 56802, HIP 118212, HIP 62207, HIP 54677, and HIP 13402. And the last three stars, as noted by scientists, gave rise to two different bursts of radio waves simultaneously, which are candidates for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
All these five stars are far from Earth, as noted by scientists, a relatively short distance, that is, from 30 to 90 light years, which makes them particularly interesting for further study, and so far, the efforts of astronomers have not been successful and repeated observations of these stars using Both GBT and other telescopes reconstruct those “technical fingerprints” that the AI system found in the Breakthrough Listen project data.
The lack of repeating signals, as Forden and his colleagues note, does not yet allow us to say that the possible “technical fingerprints” they discovered were caused by extraterrestrial civilizations, and scientists hope that subsequent observations of the five stars that generated them with the help of ground-based and orbital telescopes will help astronomers. To obtain an unequivocal answer to this question in the coming years.