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China might have detected signs of Alien life; here are all the details

While false alarms and unusual radio signals have been observed before, the narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye - the world's largest radio telescope - differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them

TN Science Desk

Updated Jun 15, 2022, 18:44 IST

China might have detected signs of Alien life here are all the details

On Tuesday, China said its giant the 500-meter 'Sky Eye' Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) radio telescope may have picked up signs of life beyond Earth, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily. The post about the discovery now appears to have been deleted.

Professor Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of the China extraterrestrial civilization research team at Beijing Normal University’s astronomy department, said that, "the suspicious signal may also be some kind of radio interference, which needs to be further confirmed or ruled out,” he pointed out. “This may be a long process.”

Construction of FAST began in 2011. The telescope observed its first light on September 2016. And after three years of testing and commissioning, it was declared fully operational on 11 January 2020.

The FAST telescope joined the Breakthrough Listen SETI project in October 2016 to search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe.

In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China's southwestern Guizhou province officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected 2 sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.

In 1977, Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States had detected a strong narrowband radio signal. It was observed that an extraterrestrial signal was emanating from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, and was called the "Wow! signal."

China's Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilisations, Zhang is quoted as saying.

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