Do aliens exist? Are they already among us? They do definitively!
And to help them searching for signals from alien civilizations, SETI has released to the public 2 petabytes (or 1015 bytes) of new digital information.
The released data represent the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and the region around its central black hole.
In releasing the new radio and optical data, researchers highlighted radio emissions from 20 nearby stars that are aligned with the plane of Earth’s orbit such that an advanced civilization around those stars could see Earth transiting the sun.
The second release of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) survey information was made by Breakthrough Listen during a media briefing in Seattle, Friday, Feb. 14th, after a petabyte of radio and optical telescope data was released last June.
“For the whole of human history, we had a limited amount of data to search for life beyond Earth. So, all we could do was speculate. Now, as we are getting a lot of data, we can do real science and, with making this data available to general public, so can anyone who wants to know the answer to this deep question,” said Yuri Milner, the founder of Breakthrough Listen.
This is why all this data has been made available to the public. They are asking for help from scientists and coders to data analysts and anyone who has an interest in the quest for alien life to run their own analyses.
It is my hope that these data sets will reveal something new and interesting, be it other intelligent life in the universe or an as-yet-undiscovered natural astronomical phenomenon. More astronomy and alien news on Strange Sounds and Steve Quayle. [BreakThroughListen, ScienceDaily]
