Proof of aliens? Stephen Hawking mission detects mysterious signals
A mission to find alien life has picked up mysterious radio signals coming from a galaxy three billion light years away. The project, dubbed Breakthrough Listen, was founded in 2015 by world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. As of now, there is no satisfactory explanation to the peculiarity of the signals.
"We really have no idea about where they come from...We have opened more questions than answers. As we do more study we find more weird things," said Vishal Gajjar, an Indian scientist working for Breakthrough Listen.
Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million global astronomical initiative, which has teams around the world, looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The initial 10-year programme is set to scan 1,000,000 stars and 100 galaxies closest to Earth. The latest experiment which detected the signals used several frequencies to scan the source of signals, and found many new signals.
Scientists had initially thought that the signals were produced from a catastrophic event like a supernova, but they found that the signals were repeated in 2015 and 2016 suggesting the continued presence of the object/source producing them. Explanations for the signals range from rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields to energy sources for extraterrestrial civilizations, but at this point everything is conjecture.
