The mysterious radio signal captured in 2019 in the direction of Proxima Centauri by the Breakthrough Listen Project was of terrestrial and non-alien origin: two studies published in Nature Astronomy extinguish the enthusiasm of those who already imagined an encounter with Et.
The signal, detected on April 29, 2019 by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, was called Blc1 (Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1) because it had all the characteristics to be considered the first, true, extraterrestrial signal candidate picked up by the Breakthrough Listen Project, an ambitious program private funded with 100 million dollars to look for signs of technologies developed by alien intelligences.
The signal Blc1, persistent for five hours in the observations and present only in the direction of Proxima Centauri, gave good hope, but from the comparison with other 60 signals, local and generated by man, it was understood that also in this case we were in the face of "radio interference produced by man and coming from some technology on the surface of the Earth", explains Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of both studies. The researchers were not able to identify the specific source of the signal, but it is likely that it was due to the malfunction of electronic elements (such as oscillators, circuits commonly used in computers, telephones and radios) located a few hundred kilometers away. from the telescope.
"The significance of this result is that the search for civilization beyond our planet is now a mature and rigorous field of experimental science", comments Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives and the Breakthrough Listen program.
Thanks to this experience, the researchers have been able to improve their techniques to unmask the "false positive" signals and have developed a handbook that could be useful in observations of the Parkes telescope but also for other instruments.