8 articles
In April 1960, radio astronomer Frank Drake quietly aimed an 85-foot dish at two nearby Sun-like stars and tuned to the frequency of hydrogen, betting a civilization would broadcast there. He found silence - and invented modern SETI in the process.
The frequencies of hydrogen and hydroxyl bracket a naturally quiet stretch of the radio sky. Because the two combine to make water, SETI's founders reasoned any curious civilization might gather there - and most searches still listen near it.
The Wow! signal hit the exact frequency scientists predicted alien civilizations would broadcast on, was 30 times louder than everything around it, and has never repeated. Here is what scientists actually know.
For the first time, astronomers had advance warning an interstellar visitor was approaching - and used it to scan 3I/ATLAS for alien tech. The Allen Telescope Array sifted 74 million signal candidates and found nothing artificial aboard.
An Indian citizen scientist working with the RAD@home network identified a radio galaxy with a unique bow-and-arrow shape in LOFAR survey data - the clearest radio signature yet of a galaxy falling supersonically into a galaxy cluster.
A 300-hour Very Large Array programme, the first systematic radio study of its kind, finds that accretion flow - not jet presence - is the variable that controls how tidal disruption events appear across all wavelengths, overturning a decade-old two-category model.
A research team has identified erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, in a molecular cloud near the Galactic Centre - marking the first sugar confirmed in the interstellar medium and tracing a chemical path toward the building blocks of life.
A PhD student using CSIRO's ASKAP telescope has traced a class of repeating cosmic radio pulses to a white dwarf binary system - the first confirmed source for signals that puzzled radio astronomers for two decades.
