How This AI Just Helped Find Possible Signs Of Extraterrestrial Life

This animation shows 93 detected signals from FRB121102. Among them 21 have previously been reported (denoted by red numbers), and 72 are new (white numbers). Each signal is shown as a spectrogram - the colors indicate the intensity of the signal as a function of frequency from 4.5 to 8.0 GHz (vertical axis) and time (horizontal axis, showing 100 milliseconds around the time of detection of each burst). Researchers at Breakthrough Listen - the program searching for signs of intelligent life in the Universe - detected 72 new radio bursts from distant galaxies using AI. In 2017, the Listen team at UC Berkeley's search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research center, had detected 21 fast radio bursts (FRB) by analyzing over 400 terabytes of data.