According to a report from the Chinese Science and Technology Daily, the country announced that its giant Sky Eye telescope may have detected signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. But strangely, the report and post about this discovery were subsequently deleted.
According to the initial report, Sky Eye – the world’s largest radio telescope – had detected narrowband electromagnetic signals that are completely different from previous signals. This prompted the research team to investigate further. The report quoted Mr. Zhang Tonjie, the chief scientist of a team searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, from the co-founders of Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Berkeley.
It remains unclear why the report was removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, at a time when this information had gone viral on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. It was even reposted by other media outlets.
Sky Eye began its search for extraterrestrial life in September 2020 with a telescope that has a diameter of 500 meters. According to Mr. Zhang’s report, the research team detected two suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected from 2019 and discovered another suspicious signal in 2022 from observations of targets beyond Earth.
Mr. Zhang stated that Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in detecting low-frequency radio waves and plays a crucial role in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. However, it is also possible that the suspicious signals collected are some form of radio interference that needs further investigation.
Source: Bloomberg