The CHIME telescope has detected a mysterious repeating radio signal far away in the cosmos – only the second ever identified of its kind.  CHIME is the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is an interferometric radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, (Danielle Futselaar)

It has been almost 60 years now that scientists — a first a few intrepid souls and now many more — have been searching the skies for radio signals that just might be coming from other advanced, technological civilizations.  There have been some intriguing anomalies that created great interest, but nothing has to date survived further study.

But two recent developments in the this Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) make clear that the lack of alien signals so far has not diminished interest in the field and in the science and technology behind it.  Rather, SETI is alive and doing quite well.

A first sign is scientific and involves what are called “fast radio blasts” or FRBs — high energy pulses that are extremely short lived and, until recently, determined to be sporadic and random.  But a paper last week from a Canadian team reported a series fast radio blast from a galaxy a 500 million light-years away that appeared to be repeating about every 16 days.

The authors put forward a number of astrophysical explanations for this most unusual pattern and shied away from any kind of SETI hypothesis.  More on this later.

But the detection is the kind of radio signal anomaly that SETI scientists and enthusiasts are looking for.  And now they will also have the opportunity to search a vast new trove of data provided by Breakthrough Listen, part of the privately-funded Breakthrough Initiatives.

A sequence of 14 of the 15 fast radio bursts from FRB 121102, the first repeating fast radio burst to be identified, in 2018. The streaks across the colored energy plot are the bursts appearing at different times and different energies because of dispersion caused by 3 billion years of travel through intergalactic space. The bursts were captured in a broad bandwidth via the Breakthrough Listen backend instrument at the Green Bank Telescope. It does not repeat in patterns like the one just discovered by the Canadian team. (Berkeley News.)

At the close of a meeting of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS) on Friday, the Breakthrough team announced the release nearly 2 petabytes (2 million gigabytes) of data, the second massive data dump from the four-year old Breakthrough Listen search for extraterrestrial intelligence

The data, most of it fresh from the telescope prior to detailed study by astronomers, comes from a survey of the radio spectrum between 1 and 12 gigahertz (GHz).… Read more