Apparently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do wonders, and now it seems it can even unravel the deepest darkest secrets of the universe and answer the questions that have tormented humans for ages now. However, a new machine learning method has found eight previously undetected “signals of interest” in the search for alien life, scientists say.
The newly found signals of interest, which came from the five stars relatively near to Earth, could possibly be indications of alien intelligence on other worlds. As per the reports artificial intelligence could possibly allow us to finally find signals of life beyond Earth. The hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is conducted with ‘technosignatures’ or signals that could possibly come from alien technology accidentally or on purpose.
However, the scientists are struggling to find those technosignatures in part because there are so many interesting candidates, much of which comes from interference.
The new system aimed at allowing researchers to filter through the vast amount of data received on Earth from the universe, and help us more quickly sort through to the data to find the signals that might be of interest.
It could also let researchers filter out false positives, which can happen when instruments pick up interference from human technology, for instance, reported Yahoo.
The report also reiterated researchers' new paper describing the system which suggested that it has already found eight “promising extraterrestrial intelligence signals of interest not previously identified.”
However, the repeated observations of those targets haven’t yet resulted in the re-detection of the signals that are similar, said the scientists.
Technosignatures are focused on radio frequencies as they travel easily through space and systems for sending and detecting them which can be built relatively easily. In particular, researchers look for narrowband radio signals that can be more easily picked apart from natural radio emissions that occur regularly throughout the universe.
The report also stated that the new system hunted through data that has been collected on those radio signals which have come from throughout the universe. It is described in a paper, ‘A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars’ which was published in Nature Astronomy.
Scientists scour through 115 million snippets of data, and found almost 3 million signals of interest. However, the system probably gave an overcount considering the way the new system hunts through those snippets and many of the signals probably do come from interference.
After sorting out the signals that have appeared to be false positives, they were left with 20,515 signals. Of those, they found eight “signals of interest” that grabbed the interest of researchers.
The eight signals received on Earth come from five different stars which are all between 30 and 90 light years.
The researchers have also said that they did not attempt to make any conclusion about whether those signals are “genuinely produced by” extraterrestrial intelligence. They urge other scientists to keep examining those targets, in the hope of finding out where the signals have come from.