A $100m project to search for aliens is yet to find anything
- Published
Science geeks on the lookout for alien life: you're going to have to wait a little longer.
A $100m (£78m) project to search for signs of alien life is yet to find anything a year after launching.
The Breakthrough Listen project is made up of giant radio telescopes which listen out for alien signals.
The scientists released, external their "11 highest ranked events" which were most likely to be signs of life - but they decided they probably came from humans.
'Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours,' says Prof Stephen Hawking
It's a 10-year project backed by the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.
In its first year, it has collected "several petabytes of data" from three locations (a petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes by the way).
The radio telescopes scan through billions of radio channels, looking for signals "that might indicate the presence of technology developed by civilizations outside our Solar System," according to Breakthrough Listen.
The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA, is one of the most powerful telescopes in the world
Last year, the project targeted a star called Tabby's Star, which had an irregular dimming pattern that some people thought could have been signs of intelligent life.
But the most widely accepted explanation was that there was a swarm of comet fragments which caused the dimming.
The software which is used for the project has been made open source so that programmers and AI experts can contribute to the search.
We're still waiting to meet this little guy in real life
"Although the search has not yet detected a convincing signal from extra-terrestrial intelligence, these are early days," says Dr Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center.
"The work that has been completed so far provides a launch pad for deeper and more comprehensive analysis to come."
Speaking at the project's launch in 2015, Prof Hawking said: "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean."
"It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth.
"We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."
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