Despite its apparently cosy location, the planet may well be hostile to life. Known as Proxima b, the planet circles its star every 11 days and lies in the so-called “habitable zone”, where the temperature is right for water to flow and pool.īut that does not mean water is present on Proxima b. One is a gas giant and the other is believed to be a rocky world about 17% more massive than Earth. At least two planets are known to orbit the star. Though too faint to be seen with the naked eye, Proxima Centauri has come under intense scrutiny from astronomers. In 1997 the US alien hunter Jill Tarter, who inspired the character of Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, detected a potential signal but it was later found to be broadcasts from an antenna on the Soho spacecraft, a joint mission to observe the sun by Nasa and the European Space Agency. The challenge for astronomers on Breakthrough Listen, and others devoted to finding intelligent life in the heavens, is to spot potential “technosignatures” among the relentless babble of radio waves from equipment on Earth, natural cosmic phenomena, and orbiting hardware that circles the planet. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.” Speaking at the event, Hawking, who saw humanity’s future in the stars, said: “Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. The 10-year effort was announced at the Royal Society in London when the late Stephen Hawking called the work “critically important”. Launched in 2015 by Yuri Milner, a science and technology investor based in Silicon Valley, the Breakthrough Listen project eavesdrops on the million stars closest to Earth in the hope of detecting stray or intentional alien broadcasts. The unusual signal, which gained its name after astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” next to the data, unleashed a wave of excitement, though Ehman cautioned about drawing “vast conclusions from half-vast data”.Īn artist’s impression of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system. The “ Wow! signal” was a short-lived narrowband radio signal picked up during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or Seti, by the Big Ear Radio Observatory in Ohio in 1977. “It is the first serious candidate since the ‘Wow! signal’,” they said. The beam that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star 4.2 light years from Earth, has not been spotted since the initial observation, according to an individual in the astronomy community who requested anonymity because the work is ongoing. Scientists are now preparing a paper on the beam, named BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen, the project to search for evidence of life in space, the Guardian understands. The latest “signal” is likely to have a mundane explanation too, but the direction of the narrow beam, around 980MHz, and an apparent shift in its frequency said to be consistent with the movement of a planet have added to the tantalising nature of the finding. “We’ve looked at every other wavelength we can, all the way from the infrared to optical to X-rays, and we see nothing, so it doesn’t seem to be consistent with any kind of star that we understand,” says David Kaplan at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who was part of the research team.It is usual for astronomers on the $100m (£70m) Breakthrough Listen project to spot strange blasts of radio waves with the Parkes telescope or the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, but all so far have been attributed to human-made interference or natural sources. When it finally lit up again in February this year, several months after the initial detection, they pointed some of the most powerful non-radio telescopes we have at it and saw nothing. The researchers found that the object occasionally flared for up to a few weeks, but was dark most of the time. They made further observations with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

He and his colleagues spotted the emissions six times in 2020 using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope. The source of this radiation has been nicknamed “Andy’s object” after Ziteng Wang at the University of Sydney in Australia, who goes by the name Andy and first discovered the radio waves.

They turn on and off seemingly at random, and their source must be unlike anything else we have seen before.

Strange radio signals are coming from the direction of the centre of the galaxy and we aren’t sure what is emitting them. Illustration of radio waves coming from the galactic centre

Mystery radio signal from space