Report saying China may have detected signs of alien life deleted | World News - Hindustan Times
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Report saying China may have detected signs of alien life deleted

Jun 15, 2022 06:36 PM IST

It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending

A trending report in the state-backed Science & Technology Daily claiming that China’s Sky Eye telescope may have picked up possible “technological traces” of an alien civilisation in a signal from space was deleted soon after being published, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Operationalised in 2020, the FAST is a single-dish telescope and is located in southwest China’s Guiyang city, the capital of Guizhou province. (AFP/ REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE)
Operationalised in 2020, the FAST is a single-dish telescope and is located in southwest China’s Guiyang city, the capital of Guizhou province. (AFP/ REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE)

The now-deleted report said that the discovery was made by researchers working under Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of the China extraterrestrial civilisation research team at Beijing Normal University’s astronomy department, state-backed online outlet Yicai reported, quoting the Science & Technology Daily.

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“The team discovered two groups of signals from space in 2020 when processing data observed by FAST in 2019,” Zhang said.

FAST is the acronym of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST).

“The suspicious signal may also be some kind of radio interference, which needs to be further confirmed or ruled out,” Zhang said, adding: “This may be a long process.”

News agency, Bloomberg reported that Science & Technology Daily removed the story soon after publishing it.

It isn’t clear why the newspaper’s website did it though the news had already started trending on China’s Twitter-like social network Weibo and was picked up by several media outlets, Bloomberg said.

The report on the Yicai website quoted the scientist Zhang speaking about the importance of alien civilisations in a speech last year.

“Imagine if you are sailing a boat on a stormy dark sea and see a weak light from another sailing boat in the distance. Will you take out your gun to shoot him, or find him so you can help and depend on each other?”

“Here I put forward my theory of the dark sea, which is the practical significance of our search for other civilisations,” Zhang said.

“We may not be able to survive on Earth one day. We’ll need the help of alien civilisations.”

Operationalised in 2020, the FAST is a single-dish telescope and is located in southwest China’s Guiyang city, the capital of Guizhou province.

The telescope has a receiving area of around 30 football fields.

FAST is about 2.5 times as sensitive as the second-largest telescope in the world and capable of receiving a maximum of 38 gigabytes of information per second.

“With a cost of nearly 1.2-billion-yuan (around US$170 million), FAST was completed in September 2016, over 20 years after it was proposed by Chinese astronomers,” state media had reported earlier.

(With inputs from agencies)

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