A group of researchers working on the “Breakthrough Listen” project (linked to SETI) published preliminary results after analyzing several petabytes of data from three telescopes participating in a research project. They are posted on the official website.
Publicly announced the project in 2015. He was supported by the popular physicist Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who, together with other sponsors, invested $ 100 million in a 10-year project. These two years, the Parks Observatory (Australia), the Green Bank Radio Telescope (USA) and the Automated Planet Finder optical telescope (USA) were tracking space radio signals, expecting that one of them could be a sentient creature.
Telescopes collected several petabytes of data from 692 stars. Each had 3 observations of 5 minutes. There are a total of 1,709 goals. The team has created two categories of objects: located within the boundaries of 16 light years and those that are distant in the region of 163 light years. Last year, participants announced an uneven darkening of the Tabby Star. But the data suggested that the signals were influenced by comets, and not by the alien “hand”. The team reported that they now have 11 signals that deserve close attention. But so far there is no exact data that one of them was sent by an extraterrestrial form of life.
The process of screening data is very simple. First, it is necessary to distinguish artificial signals from natural ones, observing irregular behavior (modulation or pulsating patterns). Next, you need to make sure that such deviations do not occur on our planet. The software is open source, accessible to everyone. Therefore, researchers invite everyone to join the process.
