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.


A view of the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia (Picture: PA)

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Scientists cannot explain the origin of fast radio bursts, but have suggested they are produced by neutron stars, supermassive black holes or even technology built by an advanced alien civilisation.



The new signals were detected by using an AI to analyse data that has already been gathered by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

All the burst were produced during one hour, suggesting ‘that the source alternates between periods of quiescence and frenzied activity’.

‘Not all discoveries come from new observations,’ remarked Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives.

‘In this case, it was smart, original thinking applied to an existing dataset. It has advanced our knowledge of one of the most tantalizing mysteries in astronomy.’

Scientists cannot yet identify the process which produces the short and sharp radio wave bursts, which means it is not possible to decide they were not made by aliens.

‘Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,’ Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics research institute, said in 2011.

‘An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.’