China has claimed it may have detected alien signals through a telescope that began searching for extra-terrestrial life in 2020, Bloomberg reported, citing a document published by Science and Technology Daily -- the official newspaper of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
The report was however removed from the Science and Technology Daily website after the news gained attention on social media.
The document had said that a team working with the Sky Eye telescope, situated in China's Guizhou province, had found two strange signals in 2020. It had been processing data collected in 2019.
Another suspicious signal was detected in 2022 while observing data from exoplanets, the report added, quoting Zhang Tonjie, the chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search, according to Bloomberg.
The scientist said that the signals picked up by Sky could be radio interferences. They will require more studying, he added.
Zhang, in the now-deleted report, described the telescope as "extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band". He said has an important role in the search for alien civilizations.
Space agencies around the world are looking for answers to the fundamental question: are humans alone in the universe?
NASA had said in 2021 that it was yet to find credible evidence of alien life. It has an astrobiology program that focuses on the origins, evolution, and distribution of life beyond Earth.
"From studying water on Mars, probing promising “oceans worlds,” such as Titan and Europa, to looking for biosignatures in the atmospheres of our cosmic neighborhood and planets outside our solar system, NASA’s science missions are working together with a goal to find unmistakable signs of life beyond Earth," the agency has said.
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