Is it a message from an alien civilization? Probably not, but it’s a sufficiently strange to raise eyebrows in the scientific community. National Geographic reports:
Astronomers searching for signs of life beyond Earth have spotted something strange. An as-yet unexplained radio signal appears to be coming from the direction of the star closest to the sun—a small red star roughly 4.2 light-years away called Proxima Centauri. Adding to the excitement, at least two planets orbit this star, one of which might be temperate and rocky like Earth.
Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long search for alien broadcasts from the nearest million stars, was using Australia’s Parkes Observatory to study Proxima Centauri when the team detected the conspicuous signal, which they dubbed BLC-1. […]
Although the signal is faint, BLC-1 passed all the tests the Breakthrough team uses to filter out the millions of signals generated by humans: It was narrow in bandwidth, appeared to drift in frequency, and disappeared when the telescope shifted its gaze from Proxima to a different object.
You can read the full story here.
