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Although alien transmission was ultimately dismissed as unlikely, NASA’s ambassador to Utah Patrick Wiggins does not lose hope that evidence will come to prove someone is there.
The Juno spacecraft, orbiting Jupiter since 2016, has now spotted a unique FM signal, believed to come from the moon Ganymede. Such detections have never been picked up by the solar system’s largest and most massive moons, ABC4 News reported.
Juno happened to pass the radio source as he traveled through the gas giant’s arctic region – a place where magnetic field lines connect to the natural satellite.
In scientific terms, the process is commonly referred to as “a decametric radio emission,” with the underlying principle resembling a currently indispensable part of our lives as the production of WiFi signals.
According to Britannica.com, Jupiter’s radio emissions were discovered in 1955, and over the past 66 years more and more discoveries have been made about how the signals work.
Despite the temptation to interpret the signal with an alien reality, Patrick Wiggins, one of NASA’s ambassadors to Utah, claimed to ABC4 that this is “not ET” and said “it is more of a natural function.” “A member of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society once built an amateur radio telescope that can detect Jupiter’s electromagnetic radiation,” he said, referring to previous studies on the subject.
Ganymede’s first find: what caused the radio emission?
NASA researchers believe electrons are responsible for the milestone radio emission that the spacecraft observed for just five seconds as it flew by at a speed of 50 km per second, or 111,847 mph. The phenomenon is considered to be a relative, albeit shorter, phenomenon of the same physical process that creates auroras on Earth.
Despite ruling out the alien version, Wiggins says he “believes life is out there,” adding that he “is still waiting for evidence to prove it.”
NASA recently released a statement saying that Juno, which was scheduled to end its mission by traveling to Jupiter in July 2021, will receive an extension along with the Mars InSight lander.
“The Senior Review has confirmed that these two planetary science missions are likely to continue to bring new discoveries and raise new questions about our solar system,” said NASA’s planetary science division director, Lori Glaze.
It will now continue to investigate the gas giant and its internal structure, including magnetic fields, until September 2025 or the end of its life, whichever comes first.
Late last year, NASA’s Juno, now at its 29th step from the planet, discovered that the legendary “hotspots” on the gas giant planet spotted by the Galileo spacecraft in 1995 are wider and deeper than previous models and observations. The results of the study were made public Dec. 11 at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall conference, held online due to the coronavirus pandemic.