CAccording to Science and Technology Daily reports, hina claimed that its Sky Eye telescope could have detected signs of alien civilisations.
The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.
In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. Zhang reported that the team found two sets of suspicious signs in 2020, while processing data from 2019. Zhang also said they discovered another suspicious signal in 2022, using observation data on exoplanet targets.
China’s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band and plays a critical role in the search for alien civilizations, Zhang is reported to have said.
He said that the suspicious signals may be radio interference, and further investigation is necessary.
Calls by Bloomberg News to the Science and Technology Daily weren’t answered.
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