Washington, Jan 7 : Astronomers, who were using data from the Kepler space telescope to become more focused on “listening” for radio signals coming from stars known to have planets orbiting them, seem to have detected the signals for their first “candidate”.

Sadly, the first candidate signals aren’t lucky detections of alien radio transmissions, they’re “undoubtedly examples of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI).”

“We’ve started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals,” Discovery News quoted scientists of the University of California as saying.

Although it’s interference from a source here on Earth, the detection of any artificial signal provides the UC Berkeley team with a great opportunity to understand the kind of artificial alien signals they hope to eventually discover.

“These signals look similar to what we think might be produced from an extraterrestrial technology. They are narrow in frequency, much narrower than would be produced by any known astrophysical phenomena, and they drift in frequency with time, as we would expect because of the Doppler effect imposed by the relative motion of the transmitter and the receiving radio telescope,” they added. (ANI)