'IT'S QUIET OUT THERE'
Scientists ‘fail to find’ alien life in scans of 1,300 stars – but say they’re not giving up yet
ASTRONOMERS performing the biggest search for alien life have come back empty handed so are making all the data they have collected public in the hope of someone else spotting something.
This will be the biggest set of data to ever be made public in the search for alien life and it comes from the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project.
The Breakthrough Listen project was launched in 2016 and so far it has used ground-based radio telescopes to listen out for signs of intelligent alien life in areas around 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth.
Scientists think these signs will come in the form of “technosignatures” or signals that indicate the use of advanced technology out in the Universe.
Danny Price, the Breakthrough Listen Project Scientist for the Parkes observatory in Australia said: “This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team.
“We scoured thousands of hours of observations of nearby stars, across billions of frequency channels.
"We found no evidence of artificial signals from beyond Earth, but this doesn't mean there isn't intelligent life out there: we may just not have looked in the right place yet, or peered deep enough to detect faint signals.”
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Some signals have been picked up by the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes telescope in Australia during the project but scientists think they may have come from Earthly mobile phone signals.
Danny Price, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Breakthrough Listen project, "It’s quiet out there."
However, the researchers aren't giving up hope of finding alien life just left as the project is expected to last around 10 years and there are still hundreds of thousands of stars left to search.
There is hope that “technosignatures” could reveal the presence of an alien civilisation.
During the project, the researchers filter out any signals that appeared to come from nature or equipment on Earth and leave behind signals that have no other explanation.
Scientists think that observing Teegarden’s star could be the best bet so far as it is thought to have two Earth-like planets orbiting it.
What is the Breakthrough Listen project?
Scientists want to know if something is out there...
- The Breakthrough Listen project was set up to search for intelligent alien life in the Universe
- It was launched in January 2016 by famous experts like Stephen Hawking
- The project should run for around 10 years
- It is funded by $100 million (£79,500,000) and special telescope facilities have set aside thousands of hours for it
- Breakthrough Listen is considered to be the most comprehensive alien searching project to date
- The project makes radio wave observations from two state of the art telescopes and visible light observations from another
- It aims to observe one million nearby stars and the centres of 100 galaxies
- So far, it hasn't found any signs of intelligent life but there are still many more stars to search
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