Alien life news: SETI makes major announcement after deep scan of 1,327 alien stars

The SETI scans have analysed more than 1,300 alien stars for artificial signals, radio waves and proof of advanced life in space. Altogether, the data dump represents more than one Petabyte (PB) or 10,73,741,824 Megabytes of collected data – the equivalent of streaming music for 1,600 years. The data was collected through a partnership between the University of California, Berkley, and the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Telescope. UC Berkeley’s so-called Breakthrough Listen initiative has now made the alien scans available to the public.

Dr Danny Price, a project scientist for Breakthrough Listen for Parkes, said: “This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team.

“We scoured thousands of hours of observations of nearby stars, across billions of frequency channels.”

The Breakthrough Listen team scans the night skies for signs of so-called technosignatures or evidence of artificially built technology.

Any alien species hiding in the vast expanse of the universe could be broadcasting communication signals in a wide manner of ways.

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Because of this, scientists are on the hunt for unusual radio frequencies, bright lasers or tell-tale signs of interstellar propulsion technology.

The initiative is currently listening to more than 1,700 nearby stars with the aid of the Green Bank Radio Telescope (GBT) in the US and the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.

However, observations are expected to soon span more than one million stars, thanks to the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.

All of the collected data is now available online through the Breakthrough Listen Open Data Archive.

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Matt Lebofsky of Berkeley’s SETI Research Center (BSRC) said: “While we have been making smaller subsets of data public before in varying forms and contexts, we are excited and proud to offer this first cohesive collection along with an instruction manual, so everybody can dig in and help us search.

“And we’re just getting started – there’s much more to come!”

So, did the giant data set uncover any evidence of advanced alien life out there in the cosmos?

Unfortunately, the results have so far been unfruitful but the scientists note they are essentially looking for a needle in a haystack.

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Dr Price said: “We found no evidence of artificial signals from beyond Earth, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligent life out there: we may just not have looked in the right place yet, or peered deep enough to detect faint signals.”

Once Breakthrough Listen casts its gaze upon one million stars, scientists will be able to survey the entire galactic plane of 100 nearby galaxies.

An analysis of the data was submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Breakthrough Listen was launched in 2015 by theoretical physicists and tech investor Yuri Milner.

source: express.co.uk