| Title | Another Sweeping Search for Aliens Comes Up Short | |
| Date | Saturday September 12 2020, @02:21PM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the ET-phone-Earth dept. | ||
Another Sweeping Search for Aliens Comes Up Short:
A groundbreaking survey of over 10 million star systems has failed to detect signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Astronomers working with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in Western Australia were unable to detect alien technosignatures while surveying millions of star systems in the Vela constellation, according to new research published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. The authors of the new study, Chenoa Tremblay from CSIRO and Steven Tingay from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), were hunting for low radio frequencies similar to those produced by our own civilization.
[...] The new search, which included over 10 million stars, was "orders of magnitude" higher than previous MWA surveys, as the authors wrote. From the 30 hours of observation, 17 were "free from imaging artifacts likely caused due to the instrument being actively worked on during the day, while the observations were taken at night."
The null result is not entirely surprising, as the volume of space surveyed by the astronomers is still exceptionally small. In the press release, Tingay said it "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."
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printed from SoylentNews, Another Sweeping Search for Aliens Comes Up Short on 2024-04-24 13:18:23