A team of scientists is proposing a new way to find extraterrestrial life across the universe. They say that the best way to find aliens is to look for signals that they may be sending to also find other kinds of life or even to contact us.
Every person on our planet has wondered at least once if we are alone in the universe. It is indeed the most asked question in the world. Some people are really interested in the topic, some other don’t like to think about it, but the fact is that people talk about and look forward to finding the answer to it.
Currently, astronomers are using a variety of methods to look for habitable planets and for signals from extraterrestrial beings. This journey has been highly successful since we have been able to reach distances we might have once thought we would never reach, and we have also discovered more than 2,000 exoplanets around distant stars.
A big part of the journey has not been that successful which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
According to the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen, Germany, and from McMaster University in Canada, this search hasn’t been properly optimized. They are proposing that the best way to find extraterrestrial civilizations is to think they are also looking for us, so we should look for signals that they have left behind.
The two scientists have spotted a small band in the sky from which Earth could be easily detected, and suggest that future research should focus on that part of the sky to look for signals that may come from that area.
If we think in coincidences and if aliens actually exist, they could have already discovered Earth the same way we have discovered other exoplanets and might be already trying to contact us. According to the researchers, if that is actually happening, the probabilities to find extraterrestrial signals are much higher in this part of the sky.
“It’s impossible to predict whether extraterrestrials use the same observational techniques as we do,” study author René Heller said in a news release, as reported by The Christian Science Monitor. “But they will have to deal with the same physical principles as we do, and Earth’s solar transits are an obvious method to detect us.”
Focusing on this area of the sky reduces the extensive region that would require being studied, and also drastically reduces the amount of data to be analyzed. It makes the job a little bit easier.
The project is named “The Breakthrough Listen Initiative” which began its quest last year. By the use of high-tech radio receivers, they are trying to tune any possible alien broadcast