Why the recent signal that appeared to come from Proxima Centauri almost certainly didn t astronomy.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astronomy.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Whilst not a transmission from an alien life-form, the signal can be used to understand the magnetic field of this and similar exoplanets, which in turn would help find out the properties of its atmosphere and interior, resulting in establishing how habitable it might be. If confirmed through follow-up observations, this radio detection opens up a new window on exoplanets, giving us a novel way to examine alien worlds that are tens of light-years away, said Professor Ray Jayawardhana of Cornell University, US, and co-author on the new research. The discovery comes as data collected from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia revealed another signal had been detected emanating from the region of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us after our own Sun.
Scientific American also has a good synopsis). The work on analysis has not yet been published in the scientific journals, though papers are expected to come out soon, so we don t have the whole story yet. I am in general reluctant to report on non-published data, but given that this news is out there, I think it s important to give people the background.
The signal was detected as part of a set of observations of the star Proxima Centauri (usually just called Proxima) in the summer of 2019. It was being done as part of Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to observe the nearest one million stars to our Sun using radio telescopes across the world to look for signals of alien intelligence.