Axios: “Scientists with the alien-searching Breakthrough Listen project are investigating a signal that may have come from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. If confirmed as a true sign of life, it would be wildly exciting. However, in all likelihood, the radio signal – found in 2019 – has a much more mundane origin story. Scientists with Breakthrough picked up a ‘narrow beam of radio waves’ during observations with the Australian Parkes telescope in May and April of 2019.”
“These narrow beams are of particular interest because they look like the kinds of radio waves humans send out into the universe, but that also makes it harder to parse whether a signal like this is alien or human in origin. The scientists behind the discovery haven’t been able to find an obvious explanation for the signal and are now performing follow-up observations to try to piece it together. ‘The most obvious thing for them to do is to go back and use either Parkes or another observatory with similar sensitivity and just look again,’ the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak, who isn’t involved with the new research, told me.”