Astronomers look at one patch of sky and see no signs of alien life
Worlds without end: Using an Australian radio telescope array focused in the FM frequencies, astronomers did a seventeen hour sweep of one small of sky and found no evidence of alien transmissions.
“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.”
Professor Tingay said even though this was the broadest search yet, he was not shocked by the result. “As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘space is big, really big’. … And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.
The radio array used in this search is only a small precursor to a much larger array, dubbed the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which is under construction and many times more sensitive.
Worlds without end: Using an Australian radio telescope array focused in the FM frequencies, astronomers did a seventeen hour sweep of one small of sky and found no evidence of alien transmissions.
“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.”
Professor Tingay said even though this was the broadest search yet, he was not shocked by the result. “As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘space is big, really big’. … And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.
The radio array used in this search is only a small precursor to a much larger array, dubbed the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which is under construction and many times more sensitive.