Ever since humans began to think, we have wondered about life in the sky. And for the last 60 years, we have been officially searching for our space neighbors.
Recently, the astronomers in Australia found a mysterious and unexplained signal coming our way, and this is the most convincing signal of alien life we have received so far. The best part? It’s coming from the nearest star to our sun – Proxima Centauri.
This star may have an Earth-like planet
Proxima Centauri is a small red star that is so close to us, it’s almost unbelievable. At just the distance of 4.2 light-years, this distance is literally next door in cosmic terms. But don’t let that fool you, even our fastest spaceship will take 84,000 years to reach there!
Two planets orbit this red dwarf, and one of the planets is likely to be a rocky planet like Earth with mild temperatures.
Mysterious signal qualifies and passes all tests
We have been listening for radio signals for a long time, and finally, Australia’s Parkes Observatory detected the kind of signal we need.
This particular signal has all the qualifications to be an extraterrestrial artificial signal – it’s narrow in bandwidth, appeared to drift in frequency, and disappeared when the telescope shifted its gaze from Proxima to a different object.
Many scientists have said that this is the most tantalizing radio signal received in the history of space research because this signal looks like the signal we humans use to communicate with each other.
“Only human technology seems to produce signals like that. Our WiFi, our cell towers, our GPS, our satellite radio—all of this looks exactly like the signals that we’re searching for, which makes it very hard to tell if something is from space or from human-generated technology.”
There was another mysterious signal we don’t know the source of
Scientists have discovered many mysterious signals in the past – which turned out to be something else. Many strange signals were actually coming from pulsars – the rotating core of dead stars.
There are still some radio signals that could be artificial signals based on the narrow wavelength and very precise bursts – but we haven’t found any final proof yet. For example, there was this famous “WOW!” radio signal that we detected in 1977 at the Ohio State University, and no one knows the real origin of that signal.
But what if it’s really from aliens?
If this signal is, against all odds, a postcard from the star system next door, then statistically speaking the Milky Way must be absolutely stuffed with communicating civilizations, says the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak. “In this case, there would be more than a half-billion societies out there in our own galaxy—that seems like a lot.”
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