Astronomers Are Keeping a Close Watch on the Next Star Over
Last month, as 2020 drew to a close and we on Earth completed one of our strangest orbits around the sun, news broke that astronomers had picked up a mysterious signal from another star.
Astronomers could tell, from the specific properties of the beam of radio waves, that it wasn’t made by an act of nature, such as a cosmic explosion. The signal coming from the star’s direction was produced by technology.
The signal, known as BLC1, was intriguing, but when news of its detection to , the astronomers who detected it—and others in the field—were that although the transmission came from some kind of technology, the technology probably belonged to us. In the weeks since the news emerged, the researchers have done more work, and they believe that although the signal is artificial, it’s probably not the work of aliens.
