On June 14, the newspaper Science and Technology, part of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, reported that China’s Sky Eye telescope may have detected signs of extraterrestrial civilization. The narrowband electromagnetic signals collected by Sky Eye are completely different from previously recorded data.
Sky Eye is currently the largest telescope in the world. (Photo: Getty Images).
According to Bloomberg, this article was deleted without explanation. Before it was removed, the article was widely cited by other news outlets and shared extensively on Weibo.
The information in the article quoted Zhang Tonjie, the lead scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), which was established by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Berkeley (USA).
Sky Eye is the largest radio telescope in the world, officially known as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). This telescope launched its program to search for signs of extraterrestrial life in September 2020 after a testing period.
The size of Sky Eye is equivalent to 30 football fields, with the ability to detect pulsars more than 2.5 times more sensitively than the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the second-largest radio telescope in the world, which collapsed in December 2020.
According to Zhang, scientists identified two clusters of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected from the previous year. By 2022, they discovered additional strange signals derived from observations targeting extraterrestrial objects.
Sky Eye is highly sensitive to low-frequency radio bands, which may originate from extraterrestrial civilizations. Of course, further research is necessary as the suspicious signals could simply be caused by radio interference.
According to Zhang, the search for extraterrestrial life using Sky Eye will not interfere with the regular observational work that FAST is performing, which includes searching for pulsars and interstellar radio signals that may provide clues about the formation of the universe.
