Are there aliens?

After launching the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, the "Chinese eye in the sky" has made important progress.

According to Science and Technology Daily microblogging news on June 14, Professor Zhang Tongue, chief scientist of the Chinese extraterrestrial civilization search group in the Department of Astronomy and Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, revealed that his team has found several cases of possible technological traces and candidate signals of extraterrestrial civilizations from beyond the Earth using the "China Sky Eye". Zhang Tongue said that several narrow-band electromagnetic signals are different from the previous ones, and the team is currently working on further investigation. "The search road of 'China's eye in the sky is long, and we have been working hard."

The "Chinese eye in the sky" found suspicious signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, some citizens said, Are there "aliens"?

"China's Eye in the Sky catches mysterious signals

A week ago, the 500-meter spherical radio telescope (FAST), known as "China's eye in the sky", captured the world's first continuously active repetitive fast radio burst, named "FRB 20190520B", which was published in the international academic journal "Nature" on June 9, 2022, Beijing time.

According to the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Li Gene, "What we have found this time is the first continuously active fast radio burst, that is, every time we go to the sky eye it has a signal, especially faithful and reliable, and it shows very strange characteristics, this kind of short signal will happen repeatedly. There are about three to four bursts an hour, and one burst commonly lasts a few thousandths of a second."

This discovery, triggered a lot of buzzes, on the one hand, this is "China's eye in the sky" another "only" discovery, worth celebrating; and on the other hand, this discovery of the bright astronomical "spark "On the other hand, many citizens associate the discovery with extraterrestrial civilizations.

On June 6, according to Japanese media reports, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced that more than 20 kinds of amino acids were found in the asteroid "Ryukyu" samples collected by the probe "Babushka 2", which is the first direct confirmation of humans "This is the first direct confirmation of the existence of amino acids outside the Earth. As amino acids are the basic units of protein, they are also an important clue to the origin of life on Earth. This discovery is considered likely to prove that life originated outside the Earth, and at the same time has given rise to widespread speculation about extraterrestrial life. (See: The existence of a "source of life" outside the Earth is confirmed for the first time! Babushka 2 finds key components of life in outer space)

JAXA's asteroid probe "Babushka 2" is approaching its target asteroid "Ryugu".

Launching the search for extraterrestrial civilizations

As the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the "China Eye" is also expected to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. This is one of the five main scientific goals of the "China Sky Eye".

The 500-meter spherical radio telescope (FAST), the "Chinese Eye", has been in a one-man show since the U.S. Arecibo telescope "collapsed" in 2020. It was officially put into operation on January 11, 2020, and has already achieved many achievements in space exploration in the past 2 years, such as the total number of 500 pulsars sent out far exceeds that of the United States, significant progress in the measurement of interstellar magnetic fields by neutral hydrogen spectral lines, the first time to reveal the complete energy spectrum and bimodal structure of fast radio bursts, and the development of multi-band cooperative observations to open up discoveries in pulsar exploration ...... etc.

In 2018, the "China Sky Eye" installed and commissioned special back-end equipment for the search of extraterrestrial civilizations, whose main role is to filter out useful narrow-band candidates from the vast electromagnetic signals of the "China Sky Eye", and exclude celestial and artificial signals. The main function of the back-end equipment is to filter out the useful narrow-band candidates from the vast electromagnetic signals of the "China Sky Eye" while excluding the celestial and artificial signals.

The search for extraterrestrial civilizations was officially launched in September 2020, mainly through time-series surveys and exoplanet target observations.

In 2020, Zhang TTongji the chief scientist of China's exoplanet search in the Cosmology and Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group of the Department of Astronomy of Beijing Normal University revealed that the team found two sets of suspicious signals from exoplanet targets during the data processing of the China Eye's 2019 time-series survey. In 2022, the team found another suspicious signal from the exoplanet target data.

The SETI observing program to detect one trillion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy with FAST's 19-beam receivers. The Andromeda constellation is divided into 21 hexagonal regions in the left image, and a zoomed-in detail of one of the hexagons is shown in the right image. Each hexagonal region can be seen to be covered by four observations from a 19-beam receiver, shown by four colors.

The discovery of more and more extraterrestrial planets, coupled with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observation capabilities, has led to a renaissance in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, and FAST is bound to become the mainstay of extraterrestrial civilization search research in the future.

Will it be the first to discover aliens?

To search for extraterrestrial civilizations, human beings have tried various methods, such as launching unmanned spacecraft or electromagnetic wave signals from Earth to outer space, such as actively receiving signals from aliens.

Zhang Tong, the chief scientist of China's extraterrestrial civilization search group in the Cosmology and Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group of the Department of Astronomy of Beijing Normal University, said that the "China Sky Eye" has three major advantages in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations: it has a larger observation area, twice the sensitivity, and a 19-wave beam that accepts signals from different areas of the sky. The Arecibo radio telescope has not been able to find credible signals before, probably because it does not have the three advantages of the "Chinese eye" which, of course, does not exclude other unknown reasons. Now, with the Arecibo radio telescope completely retired from the froth stage of history, the search for extraterrestrial civilizations falls on the "Chinese eye".

At a press conference held by the Chinese Academy of Sciences on June 7, looking back on the past 20 years of FAST construction history, Jiang Peng, executive deputy director, and chief engineer of the National Astronomical Observatory FAST Operation and Development Center was pleased. He joked: "The hardships at the time once made people confused about the future. Had we known that FAST could be so rewarding, we might have worked even harder!"

The universe is vast, and there are always too many mysteries waiting for humans to explore. Each discovery is an advancement in sky patrol observation, all for the sake of seeing a bigger world, seeing a farther universe!