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posted by chromas on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:02PM   Printer-friendly

It's quiet out there: scientists fail to hear signals of alien life

Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed.

Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation.

[...] During the three-year effort, the astronomers scanned billions of radio channels and filtered out any signals that appeared to come from nature or equipment on Earth. Having dismissed millions of signals this way, the team was left with only a handful of "events". On closer inspection, these too turned out to have prosaic explanations.

The Breakthrough Listen team described their latest attempt to track down ET in two papers released on Tuesday, which made all the data available to the public. "There could be a signal in the data that we didn't detect this time around, but others can now look through it to see if we missed anything," Price said.

Also at Astrobiology and The Register.

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars over 1.10–3.45 GHz

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction and Archiving

UC Berkeley SETI Program GitHub

Data archives.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:54PM (#857649)

    What a waste of storage space... think how much pr0n was sacrificed for this stupid project.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday June 19 2019, @11:31PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 19 2019, @11:31PM (#857663) Journal

    But if the researchers win, they could tap from the holy grail: interstellar prawn.

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