Imagine this. You have just joined the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) community and you are asked to investigate the most intriguing signal of the past half century. That’s what happened to the astrophysicist Sofia Sheikh while working towards her PhD at the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2020.

Sheikh – who now works at the SETI Institute – was asked to lead a team to investigate the Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1, an intriguing signal that appeared to be coming from Proxima Centauri. Watch this short video to find out what happened next.

Discover more about Sofia Sheikh’s rise to prominence in the SETI community, in this feature article, originally published in the February issue of Physics World.