The giant Sky Eye telescope, owned by the Chinese government, may have detected signs of the existence of alien civilizations. An article about this was published in the state-supported publication Science and Technology Daily, but after publication, the report and the message about the discoveries were deleted, writes Bloomberg.
The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by the world’s largest radio telescope, the Sky Eye, are unlike anything scientists have seen before. The team continues to study them, the report said, citing Zhang Tongjie, head of the extraterrestrial civilization search team at Beijing Normal University.
It is not clear why the message was removed from the Science and Technology Daily website, the official newspaper of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, as the news has already been widely publicized on the Weibo social network and has been picked up by other media outlets, including government ones.
In September 2020, Sky Eye, located in the southwestern province of Guizhou in China, officially began searching for extraterrestrial life. According to the report, the team found two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal from exoplanet observations in 2022, Zhang says.
The Chinese Sky Eye telescope has a diameter of 500 meters, it is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio range, and plays a decisive role in the search for alien civilizations. However, suspicious signals may well be some kind of radio interference, and therefore require further investigation, scientists say.
The Science and Technology Daily did not respond to a request from journalists about the reasons for the removal of information about the discoveries.
