Sylvie Claire / December 27, 2020

An Australian observatory picked up a mysterious signal several light years from Earth

The radio signal would have been emitted in the vicinity of Proxima of the Centaur, the star closest to the Sun, located 4.2 light-years away, reports the Guardian. It was picked up in April and May of last year by the giant radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia, the British daily said. While he regularly collects strange vibrations from space, they are usually quickly identified and most often due to human or natural interference. But here the mystery remains.

982 MHz radio waves

Australian astronomers said they isolated a narrow beam of 982 MHz radio waves. Another intriguing detail: the signal would have changed slightly during the observation, specifies the specialized site Sciencepost. The Parkes Observatory is participating in the Breakthrough Listen project, designed to detect the presence of extraterrestrial signals. We can't explain it yet, said Andrew Siemion of UC Berkeley. We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single frequency bin like this, the astronomer continues.

Serious discovery

This 982 MHz frequency band intrigued researchers. It is in fact usually released by man-made satellites. However, the emission zone does not validate this thesis. It is not excluded that this signal will eventually be recognized as terrestrial interference, but it is nevertheless the most serious discovery since the famous Wow! captured in 1977, still unexplained to this day.