“Astronomers … are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission … from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun,” the Guardian, a daily newspaper based in Manchester, England, reported on Friday, December 20, 2020. “The narrow beam of radio waves was picked up … by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May” of 2019, the Guardian said. Read story here.
The Parkes telescope (photo, left), located in southeast Australia, is a large 64-meter radio telescope currently being used by a privately-funded team searching for radio signals indicative of intelligent life.
This isn’t the first time the Parkes telescope has picked up intriguing signals. In 1998, it detected fast-burst radio signals finally traced in 2015 to “staff members opening the door of the facility’s microwave oven during its cycle” (per Wikipedia here).
The “WOW!” signal was a signal picked up in 1977 by an Ohio-based radio telescope actively searching for extraterrestrial life that received a lot of publicity. It had “the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin” (per Wikipedia here), but wasn’t detected again, and remains unexplained.
Galaxies, stars, and black holes all emit radio signals naturally. Astronomers look for tell-tales like frequency modulation (absent from the “WOW!” signal) and signals in certain bandwidths, and try to eliminate human and other possible sources, such as earth-origin radio waves bouncing off space junk. It’s precision work.
If the Parkes signal did indeed originate from Proxima Centauri, it’s almost certainly natural. Proxima Centauri has a rocky planet, but it’s bathed in radiation that would kill any life forms. Its other known planet is gaseous (like Saturn and Jupiter).
Mathematical probability argues it’s unlikely we’re the only intelligent life in the universe, which contains billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, many of which likely have planets similar to ours. Given that physical laws are the same everywhere, the existence of intelligent life on our planet suggests it could have evolved on other similar planets, and given the abundance of planets, it probably did. Or so goes the reasoning.
But the odds of ever communicating with whatever life is out there are vanishingly small. Given the vastness of space, the nearest aliens (if they exist) likely are thousands or millions of light years away. Only 76 or so stars are within 100 light years of Earth, none of them good candidates for intelligent life. In other words, the first radio signals sent into space by humans have yet to reach anywhere they might be seen or heard.
And given the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, other civilizations, if they existed, may have come and gone long ago, and even if we someday pick up a transmission from them, no one is there to receive a reply. So, while mathematical probability argues we’re not the only civilization in the universe, our alter egos are so far separated by distance and time that each is truly alone.
For further details and artist renderings for this story, plus a rundown of previous searches for extraterrestrial life, read this Daily Mail story here.
Photos: Above, the Parkes 64-meter radio telescope dish in New South Wales, Australia; part of a smaller array can be seen in the background. Below, human being hoovered up by a UFO; he later was returned to Earth and told stories of “massive election fraud.”