The country's authorities first issued a statement to that effect and then removed it.
China says it is the world's largest FAST radio telescope or Sky Eye recorded the signal of an alien civilization. According to Bloomberg, the report was published by the state-owned newspaper Science and Technology Daily, which later removed the post about the discovery.
The narrowband electromagnetic signals recorded by FAST are different from those recorded earlier, and researchers are continuing to study them. The discovery was announced by Zhang Tonze, chief researcher at the Extraterrestrial Civilizations Group of Beijing Pedagogical University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.
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However, it is unclear why the report was removed from the website of Science and Technology Daily – the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. The news has already started to spread on the social network Weibo, and has also been picked up by other media, including the state.
The 500-meter-diameter Sky Eye telescope has officially started searching for extraterrestrial life in September 2020. According to Zhang, the group recorded two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 when processing data collected in 2019, and another – in 2022, in data from observations of exoplanets.
The telescope is extremely sensitive to the low frequency range and plays one of the main roles in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. At the same time, Zhang noted that an unusual signal can be a radio interference, it needs further study.
Earlier, scientists used a new methodology to calculate the number of alien civilizations that may exist in the Milky Way. It turns out that there can be at least 36 civilizations advanced enough to broadcast signals into space.
