Over the past few days, the media around the world have been preoccupied with an announcement that appeared in the Science and Technology Daily, the official platform of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, that the FAST telescope was able to detect signals that could be interpreted as coming. of intelligent civilizations.
What did the FAST telescope capture?
FAST, also called the "eye of the sky", is the largest radio telescope in history, with a diameter of 500 meters, and takes the form of a hemisphere from the inside consisting of about 4,500 metal triangular plates, and the orientation of each of these plates can be controlled in order to focus on Specific areas in the night sky to receive radio messages from.
The FAST telescope began official work in 2016, but since 2020, a new project has been launched to search for satellite radio signals that appear to be made and not natural.
In the statement, which was issued by the Chinese magazine on June 14, it was stated that a research team led by Zhang Tongyi, chief scientist of the extraterrestrial civilization research team at Beijing Normal University, discovered two sets of narrow-band electromagnetic signals in 2020 while processing data. collected in 2019, and found another signal of the same type in 2022 from Exoplanet Observation Division data.
Since 2020, the FAST telescope has started a new project to search for artificial and not natural satellite radio signals (French)
Are they really aliens?
So far, no research papers have been issued regarding the analysis of these space signals, and therefore it cannot be judged from a scientific point of view, except after studying it extensively and excluding all possible possibilities for it being a natural signal.
On the other hand, the same statement indicated that these signals may be caused by radio interference, which is a disturbance caused by an external source that affects the electrical circuit responsible for capturing radio signals, thus causing it to be disabled or giving it false data.
Plus, these signals may be caused by something natural and we just don't know yet what that thing is.
A vivid example of this situation is the famous "WOW" signal, which was taken in 1977 by American astronomer Jerry Ehman in the form of a strong storm of radio waves that lasted for 72 seconds, through the Ohio University's wireless telescope to survey the sky.
Since then, he thought that "Wow" was a message from extraterrestrials, but in 2016 a study showed that a comet that had not been investigated before - because it was recently discovered - was in the vicinity of the constellation Sagittarius on the day of the discovery of the "Wow" sign, which is the same area in The sky from which the signal was taken.
According to that study, it is possible for the signals from this comet to cause radio disturbances similar to the "Wow" signal.
This is not a final verdict in the case of this radio signal, but it is a possibility that points to the possibility that it is just a completely normal signal.
As of the moment of writing these words, there is no confirmed evidence that scientists from anywhere on the planet have been able to monitor confirmed signals from intelligent civilizations, or any other forms of life alike.