The radio signal itself, detected in the spring of 2019 and previously reported in The Guardian, is in many ways the stuff of alien hunters’ dreams. It was a narrowband signal with a frequency of 982.02 MHz, as recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Nature, be it an exploding star or a geomagnetic storm, tends to emit on a wide variety of frequencies.
“The signal only seems to appear in our data when we look towards Proxima Centauri, which is exciting,” said Ms Sheikh. “That’s a threshold that has never been crossed by a signal we’ve seen before, but there are many caveats.”
Practitioners of the hopeful field of the quest for alien intelligence, also known as SETI, say they’ve seen it all before.
“We’ve seen these kinds of signals before, and it always turned out to be RFI, radio frequency interference,” Dan Werthimer, chief technologist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, who is not part of the Proxima Centauri study, wrote in an email. .