Wednesday, October 27, 2021

IN the NEWS - Silly Humans provide Media Catnip

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh... Psalm 2:4
 
"Mysterious ‘alien beacon’ was false alarm (Nature). In 2019, the
news media in unison proclaimed the possibility of an alien signal coming from nearby star Proxima Centauri. The SETI enthusiasts at Breakthrough Listen, funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, handed out media catnip that had the intended effect: publicity for their project. It turns out, though, that the aliens were us.

It is human-made radio interference from some technology, probably on the surface of the Earth,” says

Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and a co-author of both papers.

But the disturbance, detected by Breakthrough Listen — an ambitious and privately funded US$100-million effort in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) — looked intriguing enough at first that it sent astronomers on a nearly year-long quest to understand its origins.

The SETI team is now justifying the mistake by calling it good “practice” for a real detection." CMI