A research team from Australia recently spent seven hours listening, searching for signs of extraterrestrial life or civilization, but they did not discover anything.
As indicated in a Mail Online report, using the Murchison Widefield Array in the Western Australian desert, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI Institute experts in California went on the quest for the so-called "techno-signature."
Discovering such signs coming from things such as industry and street lights would offer proof of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way.
After seven hours of referring to the array at the galactic center, home to more than 140 identified exoplanets and billions of stars, the team didn't find any sign.
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The Milky Way's Galactic Centre, Jupiter (brightest spot in the center-left of the image), and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) galaxy (right bottom corner)
Use of Radio Telescopes
This is the fourth inspection of its type, referring to radio telescopes at known exoplanets in the galactic center, and no proof of technology has been found.
A CNET report specified that the spider-like antennas of the radio telescope the astronomers used are arranged in more than 250 tiles, designed to pick up extremely low-frequency radio waves from distant stars.
It is specifically helpful for SETI as it has an extensive field of view, enabling it to listen to a wide area of space at once.
The SETI team led by Dr. Chenoa Tremblay looked for indications broadcast by intelligent life, though a similar array can listen for molecules produced by living organisms.
Exoplanet Systems
Dr. Tremblay explained they are looking for long sustained signals or technological leakages from the inhabitants' daily lives.
Within the telescope's field of view were over 140 identified and verified exoplanets, even though how many of them are in the habitable site is not clear.
They were all in or around the galactic center, home to billions of stars clustered anywhere in the galaxy in the highest density.
Essentially, the average distance for the known exoplanet systems within the study's field of view was roughly 18,000 years, with the shortest only 127 light-years away.
With each star forecasted to have at least a single planet, even if only a part of them are around habitable stars in the habitable area where water can flow on the surface, the chances suggest there should be the presence of life.
High Chance of Discovering Habitable Planets
Past studies by the same team and using the same device engaged much closer systems that range from a few hundred to a few thousand light-years.
According to Tremblay, this is the largest population of known exoplanets within the four investigations with the WMA.
According to data fed into a computer on the identified star systems in the galactic center, modeling proposes there is a high chance of discovering habitable planets; the problem is that no indications of anything on such planets have been discovered so far.
Nevertheless, the galactic center is extremely dusty and so hard to view. Searches using space-based telescopes like the European Space Agency Gaia observatory found it hard to get an exact star count for that space zone.
Tremblay and his colleagues used the Galactic Nucleus survey for this work published as a preprint on arXiv while hunting for signs of civilization. The said survey was able to classify about 3.3 million stars in the region, although it covered an area of space equivalent to one percent of the field of view for MWA.
If this is extrapolated, explained Tremblay, they cover billions of star systems out to the Galaxy's center. That then gives them a lot of chances to hear from extraterrestrial creatures if they are out there and making technologically determinable noises.
Related information about the use of radio telescopes showing unseen galaxies is shown on TED's YouTube video below:
RELATED ARTICLE: Stellar Flares Affect the Habitability of Exoplanets
Check out more news and information on Exoplanets on Science Times.
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