If you have recently watched the Bob Lazer: Area 51 & Flying Saucers documentary on Netflix, you probably have alien fever like us.
David Lipman is a high school student from California has built an algorithm that could comb through the light that data telescopes captured from Tabby’s Star and flag images that might be signals of artificial activity.
It all started when Jason Wright from Penn State’s Department of Astronomy created a theory that strange light patterns coming from Tabby’s Star could be caused by an “alien megastructure” used to capture the star’s energy.
David Lipman caught wind of strange light patterns coming from Tabby’s Star (known as the most mysterious star in the universe.”
David created an algorithm that searches for laser activity, which could be an indicator that there was some type of extraterrestrial activity happening around the star.
During his research that summer at Berkeley, David ran his analysis several times, double checking the images his algorithm had flagged. David eventually pulled out five of the strongest candidate images that could have represented alien lasers.
“His thorough analysis of this one object will form the groundwork for the analysis of the hundreds of other targets that we’ve observed as part of the Breakthrough Listen program at APF,” writes Steve Croft, a scientist at Berkeley-SETI.
Scientists announced in January 2018 that they were fairly certain that it was dust causing all the strange dimming.
David admits that a small part of him was disappointed when his results came back negative for alien laser activity.
David is looking to add some machine learning capability to help decrease the rate of false positives.
“As for my hopes to detect signals one day, I am fairly confident that extraterrestrials are out there,” Lipman says. “I just think that probabilistically there has to be something else out there, and I think we have the capabilities of finding it.”
Read the full article by Inverse here!
