• A mission to explore intelligent alien life in the universe has recorded some mysterious signals coming from a galaxy three billion light years away, according to an Indian-origin scientist working on the ambitious project co-founded by Stephen Hawking. 
• The team working under the Breakthrough Listen project – set up by Hawking, one of the world’s best-known scientists, and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner – is set to discover the truth about the universe.
• The latest fast radio bursts (FRBs) prove their equipment is working well and ready to pick up signs of life if they exist.
• Breakthrough Listen is a USD 100-million global astronomical initiative launched in 2015 by Hawking and Miller and has teams around the world using their telescopes to look for evidence of life.
• The initial 10-year programme will survey the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth, scanning the entire galactic plane of the Milky Way.
• Beyond our galaxy it will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies at 10 billion different frequencies.
• Announcing the project at the time at a press conference in London, Hawking said it was time to commit to finding the answer to life beyond Earth.
• Explanations for the latest signals detected range from rotating neutron stars with extremely magnetic fields, to energy sources used by extraterrestrial civilisations to power spacecraft.
• Whatever they are they left their galaxy when our Solar System was just two billion years old and life was just getting going on Earth.
• At first scientists thought the signals were the fallout from a catastrophic event in space, like a supernova, but then they repeated again in 2015 and 2016 suggesting the whatever object produced them was still there.
• In the fresh experiment, which will be elaborated upon in scientific journals in future, University of California, Berkeley, experts scanned the same galaxy at a higher frequency than which had been used to see the original bursts, and found 15 more.

Source:Sciencedaily