CAPE CANAVERAL (AP) – The group leading the charge in the search for extraterrestrial life has given the all clear: An interstellar comet ooks to be completely natural and free of any alien tech.

The SETI Institute said on Wednesday that extensive radio scans by its telescope in Northern California found no signs of otherworldly technology from our solar system’s latest interstellar visitor.

The object labelled 31/Atlas was discovered last summer sweeping through our neck of the cosmic woods. Scientists quickly identified it as a comet that migrated from another star, although a few insisted without evidence it might be associated with intelligent life.

It’s only the third known object from a faraway star – all deemed of natural origin – to venture into the Sun’s turf.

Several NASA spacecraft observed the celestial iceball as it swung past Mars last October, venturing within 30 million kilometres of the red planet. The closest it ever got to Earth was in December at a whopping 269 million kilometres away.

SETI said it conducted more than seven hours of observations in July soon after the comet was discovered, searching through a wide range of radio signals. The team identified nearly 74 million narrow-band radio signals.

After accounting for human interference or signals matching the object’s movement, only slightly more than 200 signals remained, all of which “traced back to technology on the surface of the Earth or our own Earth-orbiting satellites,” according to SETI.

Results were published in the Astronomical Journal.

These results “show how realistic it is to detect a signal with the technology we have today,” co-author Valeria Garcia Lopez of Furman University said a statement.

“That is why it is important to keep searching for technosignatures, even from objects we might not expect to have signals.”

Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin