SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The team of researchers working on the Breakthrough Listen project (affiliated with SETI) has released preliminary findings after sifting through several petabytes of data obtained from three telescopes involved in the research project. The findings have been made available on the project's website as the team awaits publication of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Breakthrough Listen project was publicly announced in 2015, and has been backed by Stephen Hawking and perhaps more importantly by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who, along with other backers, has put $100 million toward the 10-year project. Over the past two years, the Parkes Telescope in Australia, the Green Bank Telescope in the U.S. and the Automated Planet Finder optical telescope at Lick Observatory also in the U.S. have been dedicated to listening to radio signals emanating from space in the hope that one or more of them might be generated by alien life forms.
The team reports that to date, project members have identified 11 signals as worthy of a closer look, but at this time, do not believe any of the signals represent alien communications. They also note that the process of sifting the data is rather simple and straightforward—first, distinguish artificial signals from natural signals by looking at irregular behaviour such as modulation or pulsing patterns. The next step involves making sure any such irregularities are not generated here on Earth. The software is open source so that anyone who wishes to participate in the search can do so.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-preliminary-results-breakthrough.html
[More Information]:
https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/News/10
https://seti.berkeley.edu/lband2017/index.html
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:44PM
Now if we got really unlucky and a hostile ET is only a few hundred light years away we could have a problem. But if life is that commonplace we should be seeing signs, right?
Seeing signs? How? We cannot directly observe planets in other star systems. Even around Proxima Centauri. We have no idea if there are smaller planets there, let alone what civilization may or may not exist on them. We do not even know if there are civilizations on satellites of our own gas giants - there is no law that would force them to reveal themselves to us.
Earth is similarly invisible to our neighbors. We used to radiate a lot of RF, but only for a brief period of time - and over interstellar distances the omnidirectional, chaotic radio transmissions stand no chance. Today very little is radiated, as we switched to close range, low power cellular networks.