Scientists have suggested that aliens may be waiting until a cosmic version of “high noon” to send us their signals.
In a new study, researchers hunted for technical signs of ET during the moments when exoplanets pass directly in front of their sun from Earth’s perspective. These precise moments may be the perfect opportunity to give a signal to Earthlings in an attempt to make contact with an alien world.
“Exoplanetary transits are special because they can be calculated both by us on Earth, as observers, and as transmitters to any potential technogenic species in exoplanetary systems,” said the study leader. Sophia Shaikh (opens in new tab), a postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. These transits, then, are a predictable and repeatable time during which the aliens may be thought to be sending messages and Earthlings may be watching to receive them.
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“This strategy helps us narrow down the huge question of where and when to look for a message in the vast reaches of space,” Shaikh told Live Science in an email.
The new study, published December 9 on the preprint site arXiv (opens in new tab) And no evidence of chatty aliens was found, scheduled for peer-reviewed publication in The Astronomical Journal. But the study discovered only a dozen distant planets. In the future, they plan to look further with different telescopes.
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Since the invention of radio technology in the late 19th century, earth broadcasting into space is leaking – and sometimes, as is the case with the famous Arecibo message of 1974 (opens in new tab), purposely sent them out in the hopes of contacting any intelligent extraterrestrials who might be listening. Anticipating that intelligent alien civilizations may also be leaking technosignals, researchers scan the galaxy as well. radio waves (opens in new tab) Which may have originated from alien tech.
but Galaxy There is a large space, so an important question is where to look. Sheikh and his team began eavesdropping on distant exoplanets passing in front of their sun, known as “scaling points”—a solution to a problem that occurs when two individuals are not communicating by default. with other. In other words, the moment of planetary transit seems to be the logical moment to connect from the point of view of both transmitter and receiver.
Sheikh and colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to search for radio signals from 12 exoplanets whose transits were observable during a brief window in March 2018. They detected a lot of radio signals – about 34,000, in fact – but 99.6% of them could be dismissed out of hand as interference from Earth’s communications. The investigation of the signals was carried out by a group of trained citizen scientists.
Ultimately, all signals except two signals were determined to be due to interference. The somewhat smaller explosions from the remaining two, Kepler-1332b and Kepler-842b – both potentially rocky planets larger than Earth – were deemed worthy of further follow-up. However, Sheikh said, both of those are also almost certainly due to interference and not genuine messages.
Still, she said, the study was proof that the discovery method could work. The researchers plan to tackle more observations at the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in California in the future.
originally published on LiveScience.com (opens in new tab),