What is the "Sky Eye" looking at? Could it have received alien signals?

Guizhou Sky Eye is the nickname of the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope designed and manufactured by my country and located in Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province. The construction of Guizhou Sky Eye started in 2011, was completed and started on September 25, 2016, and passed the national acceptance on January 11, 2020.

Since its completion, the Guizhou Sky Eye has attracted worldwide attention and has continuously made new discoveries, the most important of which is pulsars. As of December 20, 2021, the Guizhou Sky Eye has discovered 509 new pulsars and made a series of major breakthroughs in research fields such as fast radio bursts.

Is FAST's biggest mission to find aliens? Many people believe that the biggest purpose of building the Guizhou Sky Eye is to find aliens. Just a few days ago, someone published a shocking news: "Chinese scientists make a shocking statement: The Sky Eye in Guizhou may have received alien signals!" This is the title of an article published by an influential self-media friend on Toutiao. After reading it carefully, I found that his statement is not groundless.

The scientist who said this is Peng Bo, director of the FAST Key Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory. He made this statement during the live broadcast of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' 2022 New Year's Eve speech. The original words were: China's "Sky Eye" may have received signals from alien civilizations, but it has not yet been finally confirmed.

Recently, the Parkes Observatory in Australia received a signal suspected to be from aliens, which caused a sensation, as if aliens have appeared before our eyes. It is rumored that Peng Bo's words were made under this topic, which seemed to mean that since others have received it, we should also receive it, but they have analyzed it, and we have not yet analyzed it.

Does this make sense? My personal opinion is that it can be said to be reasonable, but it can also be said to be unreasonable. Every day, countless radio wave signals are transmitted from the universe, and the vast majority of them, at least more than 99.9999%, are random information naturally emitted by celestial bodies in the universe, or information sent back from various human activities. However, it cannot be ruled out that there may be regular information with intelligent characteristics. Therefore, what he said is not unreasonable.

But the problem is, it is not just my country's Sky Eye that is receiving observations of these galaxies every day. Thousands of radio telescopes around the world are listening to radio waves from deep in the universe, and the various information obtained is massive, and a lot of information has not yet been analyzed. So can we say that the world may have received a lot of alien information, but it has not been sorted out yet?

If Peng Bo's words were not supported by more data, wouldn't it be the same as saying nothing? In the future, it is possible to find some suspected information from the massive data, or it may not be found; similarly, other radio telescopes in the world may also find suspected information, or they may not find it.

So I think that as a scientist, one must be rigorous in what he says. Before being sure, a truly rigorous scientist will not speak carelessly. After receiving this suspected information, the researchers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia did a lot of work and repeatedly ruled out various possibilities, including interference from human activities and natural radio waves from celestial bodies, before reporting this news, believing that it might be related to civilization wisdom.

Therefore, I advise everyone to stay calm and listen to some sensational words without taking them seriously. It is not too late to get excited when real evidence is released.

Comparison between Guizhou Sky Eye and the world's large-scale radio telescopes Although my country's FAST occupies an important position in the world's astronomical observation field, it is not the only important one. It has the largest aperture among radio telescopes, which means that as a spherical single radio telescope, it is larger than the 350-meter Arecibo radio telescope built in the 1960s and renovated in the 1970s.

But among all radio telescopes, FAST is not the largest in the world. The world's largest radio telescope with a comprehensive aperture is the Very Large Array (VLA) located in New Mexico, USA. It is composed of 27 25-meter radio telescopes arranged in a Y shape. The individual telescopes can be moved by rails to change the distance between the telescopes to form an array with an arm length of 20.9 kilometers on each side. Different formations can also be formed to meet different observation needs.

The world's largest single radio telescope is RATAN-600 in Russia's North Caucasus region. It was built in 1974 and uses about 900 reflecting units to form a circle with a diameter of 576 meters.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is currently under construction, was jointly initiated and invested by 13 formal member countries including China, with 67 organizations from more than 20 countries participating in the design and construction. It is scheduled to be completed around 2024 and officially put into use in 2030.

After completion, the array will be composed of thousands of dish antennas with a surface area of ​​1 square kilometer. These antennas are distributed in 10 countries including Australia and South Africa. The diameter of the array reaches 3057.57 kilometers. The data received can fill 15 million 64GB iPods every day. To process this data, it is necessary to build a supercomputer that can perform one hundred trillion operations per second.

So far, the largest radio telescope array ever used by humans is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is used to capture the "true appearance" of the M87 black hole 57 million light-years away from us. The array spans about 7,000 kilometers and the effective observation area is almost equivalent to that of the Earth.

Of course, there is not really such a huge telescope, but scientists connected eight independent famous radio telescopes located in the United States, Mexico, Chile, France, Greenland, and Antarctica to form a huge array, which can observe and take pictures like a huge telescope. The observation data was analyzed for two years before the famous first black hole photo was obtained.

These different radio telescopes each have different characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, which I will not go into detail here.

Will FAST really be able to find aliens in the future? Among FAST's mission objectives, searching for extraterrestrial civilizations is one of them. In addition, there are many other tasks, listed as follows (quote):

1. To survey the neutral hydrogen in the universe and study the large-scale physics of the universe to explore the origin and evolution of the universe;

2. Observe pulsars and study the structure and physical laws of matter under extreme conditions;

3. Lead the international low-frequency very long baseline interferometry network to obtain the ultra-fine structure of celestial bodies;

4. Detect interstellar molecules, study the formation and evolution of stars, black holes in the core of galaxies, and explore the origin of life in space;

5. Search for possible interstellar communication signals and search for extraterrestrial civilizations.

Now or in the future, radio telescopes around the world, including FAST, will receive massive amounts of data from the universe every second. Who knows whether these data contain information about aliens before they are analyzed? Also, will there be any information about aliens that has been missed in the information that has been processed?

This possibility has already occurred decades ago. The famous "WOW" alien signal in the last century was discovered from the pile of missed data.

It was August 15, 1977. Dr. Jerry Ehman of Ohio State University in the United States was looking through some radio signals from space that he had processed when he suddenly discovered an unusually stable, continuous narrowband signal in a piece of machine-printed data. This signal excluded interference factors such as humans and had obvious characteristics of extraterrestrial civilization. Dr. Ehman was so excited that he couldn't help but write the three big red letters "WOW" on the data paper and put an exclamation mark.

This is the famous WOW suspected alien signal. Unfortunately, this signal only lasted for 72 seconds and then disappeared. It has not appeared until today, becoming a historical mystery. Analysis found that this message came from a star 1,800 light years away from us, which means that this message traveled in space for 1,800 years and arrived on Earth in 1977. This means that this message was sent in 177 AD. At that time, China was still in the Eastern Han Dynasty and Europe was in the Roman Empire. At that time, humans did not know what radio was.

Since the invention of radio, humans have been searching for calls from outer space and have sent radio waves to outer space, but so far, no calls have been received and it is impossible to receive any return calls, and the few suspected radio waves received have no follow-up. Recently, Australia has made a little discovery, will it be just a false alarm like "WOW"?

So, I still say the same thing. I believe that the universe is so big that there may be extraterrestrial intelligence, but I may not be able to actually discover aliens, let alone meet them. What do you think? Welcome to discuss, thank you for reading.

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