Artificial intelligence searching for alien life in the universe has discovered dozens of previously unknown radio bursts.

The Breakthrough Listen program found 72 new fast radio bursts – mysterious space signals – coming from a galaxy three billion light years away.

Space scientists have been hunting for mysterious alien signals for years, but it's difficult to find anything meaningful – space is huge, after all.

The big problem isn't actually collecting the data, but trawling through it.

That's why scientists enlisted artificial intelligence and machine learning tech to hunt for these signals within existing data caches. Robots work much quicker than humans.

This latest discovery came after AI dug through 400 terabytes of data collected in August last year. A single terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or 1million megabytes – and an hour-long BBC iPlayer programme takes up just 160 megabytes of space.

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