17 February 2023 , 15:12
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Astronomers have picked up eight mysterious radio signals that could be coming from aliens.
They may be messages sent by civilisations with technology much more advanced than our own.
The electromagnetic waves were detected using state of the art AI (artificial intelligence), or deep learning.
They were sourced to areas around five 'nearby' stars 30 to 90 light years away.
The pulses were 'hiding in plain sight' among a huge number of recordings from more than six years ago.
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An international team developed a computer algorithm to analyse the unimaginably large amount of information in more detail.
Lead author Peter Ma, an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, said: "In total, we had searched through 150 TB (terabytes) of data of 820 nearby stars.
The signals could have originated from an advanced alien civilisation (Getty Images/iStockphoto)"The dataset had previously been searched through in 2017 by classical techniques but labelled as devoid of interesting signals."
It was collected by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Bigger than the Statue of Liberty, it is part of the Breakthrough Listen project aimed at identifying extra terrestrial activity.
No 'targets of interest' were originally indicated. But the new neural network found this to be far from the case.
Manual re-examination also confirmed the findings shared several key characteristics.
The signals were narrow band, meaning they had a small spectral width of just a few Hz (Hertz). Natural phenomena tend to be broadband.
What is more, the readings, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, were 'sloped', indicating acceleration.
They also appeared only when the instrument focused on a specific celestial source, disappearing when it pointed away.
Radio is a great way to send interstellar information. It passes through dust and gas at the speed of light - 20,000 times faster than our best rockets.
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Many SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts use antennas to eavesdrop on any signals aliens might be transmitting.
Co author Dr Cherry Ng, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris, said: "These results dramatically illustrate the power of applying modern machine learning and computer vision methods to data challenges in astronomy, resulting in both new detections and higher performance.
"Application of these techniques at scale will be transformational for radio technosignature science."
The researchers are now planning to deploy the algorithm on the SETI Institute's COSMIC tool in New Mexico - where Jodie Foster heard an alien signal in the 1997 movie Contact.
It is surveying 40 million stars for 'technosignatures' - evidence of technology alien civilisations could have developed.
Since SETI experiments began in 1960 with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma at the Greenbank Observatory, a site now home to the telescope used in this latest work, technological advances have enabled researchers to collect more data than ever.
The massive volume requires supercomputers that are breaking new ground in the quest to answer the question, 'are we alone?'. A single terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.