Here’s what we know about the signal from Proxima Centauri
Next steps
The Breakthrough Listen team is now working on two scientific papers that will report more details on BLC-1. They are also undoubtedly trying to identify all possible sources of terrestrial interference, as well as determine whether the signal repeats by observing again with Parkes and other radio telescopes, or combing through archival data.
At least for now, BLC-1 is the most tantalizing SETI signal since Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope picked up the powerful “Wow!” signal on August 15, 1977. That 72-second narrowband transmission emanated from the direction of Sagittarius. The signal has never repeated, but it also remains unexplained.
If BLC-1 is simply — as is most likely — human interference, then it's no big deal, perhaps just a bit of an embarrassment to whomever leaked the story to The Guardian. But if BLC-1 is a bona fide extraterrestrial signal, it could change the course of world history. An alien radio transmitter just 4.25 light-years from Earth would be a game changer. No doubt this is why the discovery team has gone silent and is working hard to get its analysis right.
Even if BLC-1 turns out to be human radio interference, detailed analysis will help SETI researchers refine their search parameters to make later searches more efficient.
“Ultimately, I think we’ll be able to convince ourselves that [BLC-1] is interference. But the end result will certainly be that it will make our experiments more powerful in the future,” Siemion told National Geographic
A strange signal
The 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia picked up the faint signal in April and May 2019 while observing Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.25 light-years from Earth. Notably, this feeble star has at least two planets, one of which is a super-Earth with at least 1.17 Earth masses that orbits in the star’s habitable zone — the region around a star where a planet with the right conditions could host liquid water on its surface.
Astronomers were using Parkes to catch radio emission from powerful flares shooting off the star. But the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project, the world’s most advanced SETI endeavor, was piggybacking on the observations to simultaneously search for alien signals.
In late October 2020, Breakthrough Listen intern Shane Smith, an undergraduate at Hillsdale College, found a narrowband transmission at a frequency of 982.002 megahertz — in a portion of the radio spectrum rarely used by human-made transmitters — buried in the data.
Although the press reports are a bit unclear on exactly how and when Parkes detected the signal, it apparently showed up during five 30-minute periods over several days, all while the telescope was pointing directly at Proxima. Notably, when the telescope was turned away from the star, the signal vanished. Ultimately, the signal’s origin appears tightly constrained within a 16'-wide circle — roughly half the size of the Full Moon — around Proxima Centauri on the sky.
Breakthrough Listen employs software filters that reject the cacophony of signals originating from Earth or Earth-orbiting satellites to isolate those coming from deep space. But this transmission was unlike anything the project has previously encountered. Team leader Andrew Siemion told Scientific American, “It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it.”
Digging deeper
The team has dubbed the signal BLC-1, for Breakthrough Listen Candidate-1. And they are emphasizing the word “candidate.”
Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Listen’s parent organization, Breakthrough Initiatives, told Scientific American that the signal is 99.9 percent likely to be human radio interference. On December 19, he tweeted: “At this point we have some interesting signals we believe are interference but as of yet have not been able to track down the source.”
I hope this helps with what ever you are doing LOL.
