Finding 'significant signals' in the search for alien life
Most research on technical fingerprints focuses on radio frequencies, as they travel easily through space and transmission systems (Getty Images)
It is possible that radio bursts are "technical fingerprints" of extraterrestrial intelligence, but more work is needed
Scientists say a new machine learning method has found eight previously undiscovered "signs of interest" in the search for alien life.
They added that these signals of interest, which come from five stars relatively close to Earth, could be an indication of alien intelligence in other worlds.
According to the researchers, these goals and other similar things mean that artificial intelligence can finally allow us to find indications of life outside Earth .
Many searches for extraterrestrial intelligence look at "technology signatures," or signals that may have been accidentally or deliberately emitted by alien technology, but scientists struggle to find these technical signatures, in part because there are so many interesting candidates. And many of them come from overlap.
The new system aims to allow researchers to sift through the vast amount of data that reaches us from the universe and help us search faster for signals that may be important. It can also allow researchers to filter out false positives, which can occur when tools pick up interference from human technology, for example. example.
In a new study describing the system, the researchers wrote that it had previously found eight "promising signs of interest in alien intelligence not previously identified," but that repeated observations of these targets did not lead to similar signs, the scientists said.
Most research on technical signatures focuses on radio frequencies, because they travel easily through space and transmit systems, and their detection can be built up with relative ease. Specifically, the researchers looked at narrow-band radio signals that can be detected more easily far away than the natural radio emissions that normally occur in the universe.
The new system also looked for data collected on those radio signals, which came from all over the universe. This is described in a study titled "A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars" published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The scientists searched through 115 million data snippets and found about three million signals of interest. The researchers considered that this constitutes an overcount due to the way the system searches through these snippets, and many of the indicators may come from overlap.
After filtering out indicators that appeared to be false positives, the scientists were left with 20,515 indicators. Among these, they found eight "interest indicators" that captured their interest.
The eight indicators come from five different stars, all between 30 and 90 light-years from Earth.
The researchers said they did not attempt to draw any conclusion as to whether these indicators were "actually produced" by alien intelligence. They urged other scientists to continue examining these targets in hopes of finding the source of those signals.
In addition, scientists considered that the same method could be used to look through other large databases in the hope of accelerating the search for life on other worlds and planets.
Source : websites