Are alien signals being detected, or have they been discovered? Chinese scientists recently announced that their 'Sky Eye' radio telescope had detected signals from intelligent alien species. 

China's media covered this revelation and it was subsequently reported around the world becoming mainstream news.  Data going back to 2019 was studied by researchers at China's Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope.  

The data contained some signals that were presumably artificially produced by an alien intelligence. Radio telescopes cannot magnify distant images like optical telescopes.

Through the use of radio waves, radio telescopes collect information that can be analyzed by computers.  The frequency of radio waves is the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum, whereas the frequency of light waves is higher. 

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. Sky Eye has the largest diameter of any telescope in the world. It works much like the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which is now inactive.

An extremely sensitive observational instrument, Sky Eye is capable of detecting extremely faint radio signals beyond the Milky Way galaxy.  But the alien signals it detected and tentatively identified could have come from elsewhere. 

Natural phenomena produce radio signals with an unlimited range of variations. The instrument is so sensitive that it could detect signals made on earth such as electronic garage door openers or the constant 'chatter' of electronic signals. 

The facility would have computer software to sort through all of the signals and discard those that were most likely from the earth, but the software isn't 100 percent accurate.

Is there any evidence that these signals might have been produced by an alien intelligence if they are not of human origin?  Intelligent signals will have a pattern, unlike natural signals. The message would not be 'Hello'. 

Instead of a single message, we will repeat a set of ordered signals regularly. Scientists cannot determine what the message was even if they contain a message. These signals would be incomprehensible without knowing their 'language'.

The groundbreaking discovery was made by Jocelyn Bell, a young astronomer at Cambridge University in England, in 1967 when she and other graduate students built their radio telescope. 

Due to their precise nature, arriving exactly 1.3 seconds apart, and similarity to other naturally occurring radio signals, many scientists suspected these pulses were created by an alien civilization and were intergalactic lighthouses. 

Bell and her comrades then discovered an additional pair of pulses arriving precisely 1.2 seconds apart from the first set. As soon as others started looking, dozens of these perfectly timed signals, ranging from once per second to hundreds, started showing up.

The lighthouses aren't aliens, unfortunately. A neutron star's rapid rotation caused them to produce light beams. Nuclei of collapsed massive stars produce neutron stars. Pulsars have a regular pulse that causes them to be called pulsars.