![]() “And so that's why we have to go back and look again and see if the signal still there. What could be signs of extraterrestrial life may also just be a “weirdly shaped bit of a haystack,” he added. The challenge, Croft says, is recognizing that false positives may exist despite a signal meeting this criteria. “The algorithm that Peter developed has enabled us to do this more efficiently,” he said. “You've got to recognize the haystack itself and make sure that you don't throw the needle away as you're looking at the individual pieces of hay,” Croft, who collaborated on Ma’s research, told CTV News Toronto.Ĭroft said algorithms being used to discover these signals have to account for multiple characteristics, including the position they are coming from in the sky and whether or not the transmission changes over time, which could indicate if it’s coming from a rotating planet or star. Steve Croft, Project Scientist for Breakthrough Listen on the Green Bank Telescope, the institute whose open source data was the inspiration for Ma’s algorithm, said that finding radio signals in space is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Get the latest local updates right to your inbox.Download our app to get local alerts on your device.“We proved that we found things that we wanted to find … now, what do we do with all these? That's another separate issue.” “We're all very suspicious and scratching our heads,” he said. When they returned to the area, the signal was still there. These signals, Ma said, would disappear when researchers looked away from it, which rules out, for the most part, interference from a signal originating from Earth. Using this algorithm, Ma said researchers were able to discover eight new radio signals being emitted from five different stars about 30 to 90 light years away from the Earth. “We don't want to be looking at our own noisy signals.” And so unsurprised to us, we keep on finding ourselves,” Ma explained. “What we're looking for is signs of technology that signifies if the sender is intelligent or not. The idea was to help distinguish between technological radio signals created by human technologies and signals that were potentially coming from other forms of life in space. ![]() ![]() “I was just looking for projects and I was interested in astronomy,” he told CTV News Toronto. Peter Xiangyuan Ma, a University of Toronto undergraduate student and researcher, said he started working on the algorithm while he was in Grade 12 during the pandemic. A new artificial intelligence algorithm created by a Toronto student is helping researchers search the stars for signs of life. ![]()
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