Astronomers find no sign of alien life in study of more than 10 MILLION star systems
Astronomers find no sign of alien life in study of more than 10 MILLION star systems
(Web Desk) - Australian astronomers say they’ve found no technological signs of alien life in a study of more than 10 million star systems.
Perth-based researchers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in the Western Australian outback, in a project dubbed ‘looking for ET’.
The MWA searches for powerful radio emissions at low frequencies, similar to FM radio frequencies on Earth that allow radio broadcasts.
These emissions from space, known as ‘technosignatures’, could possibly indicate the presence of an intelligent aliens with technological innovations similar to our own.
The team completed the ‘deepest and broadest search’ of a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars, in the southern constellation of Vela.
But the researchers concluded that, in this part of the universe, other civilisations are ‘elusive, if they exist’ at all.
‘The MWA is a unique telescope, with an extraordinarily wide field-of-view that allows us to observe millions of stars simultaneously,’ said Dr Chenoa Tremblay at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.
‘We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before.
‘With this dataset, we found no technosignatures – no sign of intelligent life.’
