The Breakthrough Listen program picked up 72 new fast radio bursts (FRBs) from a galaxy three billion light years from Earth
ARTIFICIAL intelligence searching for alien life in the universe has discovered dozens of previously unknown radio bursts.
The Breakthrough Listen program found 72 new fast radio bursts – mysterious space signals – coming from a galaxy three billion light years away.
Space scientists have been hunting for mysterious alien signals for years, but it’s difficult to find anything meaningful – space is huge, after all.
The big problem isn’t actually collecting the data, but trawling through it.
That’s why scientists enlisted artificial intelligence and machine learning tech to hunt for these signals within existing data caches. Robots work much quicker than humans.
This latest discovery came after AI dug through 400 terabytes of data collected in August last year. A single terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or 1million megabytes – and an hour-long BBC iPlayer programme takes up just 160 megabytes of space.
Alien-hunting artificial intelligence detects dozens of deep space mystery signals
An artificial intelligence built to find evidence of extraterrestrial life has detected 72 mysterious signals emanating from deep space. A system built by the Breakthrough Listen project spotted new fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from a ‘repeater’ called FRB 121102 that’s 3 billion light-years away from Earth. Normally, FRBs are spotted during a single ‘outburst’ which happens just once. But the repeater called FRB 121102 is the only source of multiple repeated bursts, including 21 detected in 2017.