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Alien hunters have finally resolved the mystery of what they called 'the weird signal from Parkes' which had researchers worldwide excited about finding life on another planet.
A Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) team at the University of California Berkeley pitched in to run tests on a signal detected by Australia's Parkes radio telescope while it was looking at the Proxima Centauri system in 2019.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system and has an Earth-like planet, Proxima b, in a so-called habitable zone.
It is 4.22 light years away which would take around 73,000 years to reach using our current spacecraft technologies.
Many international researchers hoped the signal, which had all the signs they hoped for, was a 'technosignature', a marker which could signal the presence of life.
After weeks of tests the Berkeley team decided it was probably a type of distortion called 'intermodulation'.
In the case of the Parkes' signal, it was radio interference caused by the interaction of two frequencies used by devices on Earth.