(ORDO NEWS) — A team of two scientists has developed a new technology to search for data in old information previously collected using radio telescopes. Researchers will try to find traces of aliens that they could simply miss.
The study, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could open up vast new regions of the universe for SETI scientists to explore.
Thus, as the authors hope, our chances of detecting “powerful transmitters” in deep space, indicating that we are not here ourselves, will increase.
I think after a while we realized that when we make a SETI observation with a radio telescope, we are sensitive not only to the target star in the center of the field, but also to a part of the sky the size of the moon.
Other objects in this area include foreground and background stars in our own Milky Way. Until recently, we did not know how to use this fact because we did not know the distance to these stars,
said study co-author Michael Garrett.
Using the European Space Agency‘s Gaia telescope, Garrett and his colleague Andrew Simion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator for the Breakthrough Listen program, were able to obtain much more accurate measurements.
How to look for traces of extraterrestrial life in old data
Based on the new precise measurements, scientists have analyzed more than 400 previous Breakthrough Initiative studies of our galaxy and identified more than 140,000 objects never seen in various telescopes.
Among these “astrophysical exotics”, according to a press release, were:
- Galactic core
- Radio galaxies
- Interacting galaxies
- Galaxy whose gravity formed a gravitational lens
That is, wherever scientists point their telescope, some interesting space object will come into view.
And now, when it is known that how to identify this exotic previously hidden from our eyes, the chances of humanity to meet an alien signal increase significantly.
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