News of science:
Here's the good news: You can turn off the loop of the song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind that you've been playing for the past hour and a half. The bad news has come to pass; We haven't found aliens yet.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project has started its first analyses of its scans of the 86 exoplanet candidates uncovered by the Kepler space telescope. And scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Friday that SETI found its first batch of "hits" within the data. However, additional analyses have shown that the project's first candidate signals are just plain ol' terrestrial radio frequency interference.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Even though these signals are interference, detecting events with similar characteristics to what we expect from [extraterrestrial technology] is a good indication that the first steps of our detection algorithms are working properly," reads a blog post on SETI's site.
In this case, the narrow, shifting frequency of the observed signal matched the characteristics that researchers were expecting to see in an artificial radio signal generated from space. However, these characteristics are also shared by the radio signals created from humanity's own satellites orbiting Earth.
To test whether the radio signals were truly extraterrestrial, or just us, researchers moved the telescope they were using to scan the skies. After all, if a radio signal is being generated by a source up in space, then pointing the telescope elsewhere would eliminate its ability to detect the signal. In the case of SETI's discovered signals, however, they persisted: A sign that a human-launched satellite was generating a strong enough of a signal to be picked up by the telescope regardless of where it was pointing.
In short, no aliens.
The SETI project plans to continue to analyze the nearly 50 terabytes of data generated from its Kepler observations, and the group will update its blog with any additional results that pop up throughout the next many months.
News source:pcmag
Here's the good news: You can turn off the loop of the song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind that you've been playing for the past hour and a half. The bad news has come to pass; We haven't found aliens yet.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project has started its first analyses of its scans of the 86 exoplanet candidates uncovered by the Kepler space telescope. And scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Friday that SETI found its first batch of "hits" within the data. However, additional analyses have shown that the project's first candidate signals are just plain ol' terrestrial radio frequency interference.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Even though these signals are interference, detecting events with similar characteristics to what we expect from [extraterrestrial technology] is a good indication that the first steps of our detection algorithms are working properly," reads a blog post on SETI's site.
In this case, the narrow, shifting frequency of the observed signal matched the characteristics that researchers were expecting to see in an artificial radio signal generated from space. However, these characteristics are also shared by the radio signals created from humanity's own satellites orbiting Earth.
To test whether the radio signals were truly extraterrestrial, or just us, researchers moved the telescope they were using to scan the skies. After all, if a radio signal is being generated by a source up in space, then pointing the telescope elsewhere would eliminate its ability to detect the signal. In the case of SETI's discovered signals, however, they persisted: A sign that a human-launched satellite was generating a strong enough of a signal to be picked up by the telescope regardless of where it was pointing.
In short, no aliens.
The SETI project plans to continue to analyze the nearly 50 terabytes of data generated from its Kepler observations, and the group will update its blog with any additional results that pop up throughout the next many months.
News source:pcmag
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