Itโs never aliens, until it is. Today, news leaked in the British newspaper The Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nevertheless a cosmic stoneโs throw away at just 4.2 light-years. Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)โa so-called โtechnosignature.โ Now, speaking to Scientific American, the scientists behind the discovery caution there is still much work to be done, but admit the interest is justified. โIt has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it,โ says Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley.
Most curiously, it occupies a very narrow band of the radio spectrum: 982 megahertz, specifically, which is a region typically bereft of transmissions from human-made satellites and spacecraft. โWe donโt know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequencyโ such as this one, Siemion says. Perhaps, he says, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But โfor the moment, the only source that we know of is technological.โ
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/12/23/alien-hunters-discover-mysterious-signal-from-proxima-centauri/
