China recently released a report this week, which has promptly been taken down since, claiming that its giant radio telescope, Sky Eye, may have found signals that point to alien civilisations, according to Bloomberg.
The report was released in the Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper managed by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
However, local publications had already picked up the news by then, and it was trending on Weibo, a social media site.
The Sky Eye, officially known as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, picked up narrow-band electromagnetic signals that were different from signals of this type observed earlier, according to Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team.
This team was put together by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
Suspicious Signals Could Just Be Radio Interference
This is not the first time that the Sky Eye has found signals that have seemed suspicious – in 2020, the team found two sets of such signals while processing data from the previous year, according to Zhang. They also detected a suspicious signal from data regarding exoplanet targets in 2022.
The Sky Eye is located in Guizhou, China, and was declared operational in 2020. The large size of the telescope allows for it to be extremely sensitive to radio signals that are billions of light years away, facilitating deep-space exploration and equipping it to pick up any signs of extraterrestrial life that exists within its range.
The telescope works by detecting these distant, weak signals and amplifying them enough to be able to observe and draw conclusions.
Zhang also mentioned that these suspicious signals could just be radio interference, and they need to be looked into further to be able to draw conclusive results.
The lack of certainty regarding what these signals indicate could be a reason for the hasty removal of the report from the Science and Technology Daily website, however, there has been no confirmed reason for the post’s takedown from their side yet.
The extreme sensitivity of the machine could also lead to false readings, Zhang added, even if the facility is built in a remote area to minimise instances of radio interference, making it even more important for scientists to be thorough before making any conclusions.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)
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