Signals From the Milky Way

Could intelligent aliens be lurking at the heart of the Milky Way?

A new search for extraterrestrial life aims to find out by listening for radio pulses from the center of our galaxy. Narrow-frequency pulses are naturally emitted by stars called pulsars, but they're also used deliberately by humans in technology such as radar. 

Because these pulses stand out against the background radio noise of space, they're an effective way of communicating across long distances — and an appealing target to listen for when searching for alien civilizations.

Scientists described the alien-hunting strategy in a new study, published May 30 in The Astronomical Journal. Researchers led by Cornell University graduate student Akshay Suresh developed software to detect these repetitive frequency patterns and tested it on known pulsars to be sure it could pick up the narrow frequencies. 

These frequency ranges are very small, at about a tenth of the width of frequencies used by a typical FM radio station. The researchers then searched data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia using the method.  READ MORE...

China's Received Signals from Aliens

The signals were detected by the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) located in 

southwest China's Guizhou Province. (Image credit: NAO/FAST)

China is claiming that its enormous "Sky Eye" telescope may have picked up trace signals from a distant alien civilization, according to a recently posted and subsequently deleted report by Chinese scientists.


Astronomers at Beijing Normal University have discovered "several cases of possible technological traces and extraterrestrial civilizations from outside the Earth," according to a report published Tuesday (June 14) in Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology.


The signals were picked up by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), nicknamed "Sky Eye," which is the largest radio telescope in the world. 

Sky Eye was put to work scanning deep space for radio signals that could indicate extraterrestrial life in 2019; sifting through that data in 2020, the researchers said they spotted two suspicious narrow-band, potentially artificial radio signals. 

Then, in 2022, a targeted survey of known exoplanets found another strange narrow-band radio signal, bringing the tally up to three.  READ MORE...