According to a new study, some of the strongest of those radio signals have reached far-off stars. And apparently, if those stars happen to be home to extraterrestrial life that could respond to our ping, we could be hearing back as early as 2029.
It’s an incredibly long shot. “Our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials,” Jean-Luc Margot, a radio astronomer from UCLA, said in a Popular Science article. “The probability that another civilization resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilizations in the Milky Way.”
But it’s not impossible, and for some astronomers, “not impossible” is worth investigating. The team behind this recent study wanted to see if signals from NASA’s Deep Space Network, or DSN—the super-powered and super-focused radio array used to communicate with deep space missions like Voyager and New Horizons—could have run into any exoplanets by now that might host life.
The goal of this study was to provide potential targets for further analysis. In the search for extraterrestrial life, any kind of narrowing of the field is helpful, as searching the whole sky for transmissions is understandably difficult. After all, even if we spotted the right star, we could miss a shorter transmission by not having our receivers pointed the right way at the right time. If there’s life out there at all, it’s going to be hard to find and easy to miss, even with targets like this.
To read more, click on Popular Mechanics
