FAST. Image: Xinhua News Agency / Contributor via Getty Images
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.
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Candidate signals for intelligent aliens are common and often turn out to be radio signals from human sources that get bounced into telescopes such as FAST, which stands for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope. For instance, a particularly compelling narrowband radio signal detected in 2019 that appeared to originate from the nearest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri, was ultimately traced to an electronic device on Earth.These false alarms can be disappointing for those who hope to find life elsewhere in the universe, but they actually mark progress in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). New telescopes such as FAST, which is the biggest single-dish radio observatory on Earth, represent a new generation of sophisticated instruments that are better equipped than their predecessors to spot alien biomarkers and technosignatures, meaning signs of biological and technological activity, respectively. To that end, FAST will “achieve sensitivities never before explored” and could detect advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy or its neighbor, Andromeda, according to a 2020 paper outlining the telescope’s capabilities in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. So while it’s unlikely that the newly detected candidate signal will be traced back to smart aliens, the telescope offers one of our best shots at finding life elsewhere in the universe, if it exists. "'China Sky Eye' will repeat the observation of suspicious signals that have been discovered to further identify and detect new signals," said Zhang Tongjie in the report. “We look forward to 'China Sky Eye' being the first to discover and confirm the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations."