Scientific American also has a good synopsis). The work on analysis has not yet been published in the scientific journals, though papers are expected to come out soon, so we don t have the whole story yet. I am in general reluctant to report on non-published data, but given that this news is out there, I think it s important to give people the background.
The signal was detected as part of a set of observations of the star Proxima Centauri (usually just called Proxima) in the summer of 2019. It was being done as part of Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to observe the nearest one million stars to our Sun using radio telescopes across the world to look for signals of alien intelligence.
I love a good coincidence, and this story has two. One is pedestrian, the other cosmic.
It starts with me pondering Gaia data. Gaia is a European Space Agency observatory that is revolutionizing astronomy. Its mission is to accurately map the positions, colors, distances, and motions of over a billion stars yes, a
billion, about 1% of all the stars in our galaxy and create a massive database of the results, essentially a 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy.
And, sometimes, they can solve age-old mysteries. For example, the star Albireo is a close double star, but are the two stars physically related? Astronomers argued for a long time, but Gaia data easily showed that nope, they re not related, at two very different distances but just coincidentally aligned in the sky.
The Spitzer Space Telescope is one of them. Operated for 16 years before budgetary restraints shut it down, it still orbits the Sun on an Earth-trailing path that lets it slowly drift away from our home planet. Designed to see in the infrared, it observed the Universe from nearby asteroids to galaxies at the edge of the observable Universe billion so of light years away.
It also saw many Giant Molecular Clouds. While these are black to our eyes, they re warm enough (though still very chilly) that they glow in the infrared. And when Spitzer saw them, it
really saw them:
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