SETI experiment has found no alien signals but this technique is best to find somewhere; Research
Researchers are working hard to be in contact with the aliens in the universe but the first study came with no results.
This research has been done by astronomers from Curtin University’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia and will be published online in the Astronomical Journal.
[hana-code-insert name=’StumbleUpon’ /][hana-code-insert name=’Reddit’ /]Scientists have used “very long baseline interferometry (VLBI)” to study Gliese 581, which is a star with two planets in the “habitable zone”. Gliese 581 is located about 20 light years away from us but due to planets in “habitable zone”, it is thought to be the potential candidate for searching the Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or Seti.
VLBI is the process of combining several telescopes, which are far away from each other, so that their signals are combined to make them to work effectively. The team concentrated the Australian Long Baseline Array onto Gliese 581 for eight hours to listen to a range of radio frequencies. Although, the researchers got no result but they have found that this technique is very much suitable for searching the extra-terrestrial life.
“It’s like they’re looking at the sky through a 6-foot-long cocktail straw – a tiny bit of the sky, so they’re only sensitive to signals that are coming from right around that star system,” Seth Shostak, principal astronomer at the Seti Institute in the US, told BBC News.
“Figuring out ‘is this ET or AT&T?’ isn’t always easy, and VLBI gives you a good way of discriminating, because if you find something from that tiny, tiny dot on the sky you can say that’s not one of our satellites,” Dr Shostak added.
“Consider the fact that you could’ve looked at the Earth for four billion years with radio antennas – here was a planet that’s clearly in the habitable zone, has liquid oceans, and has an atmosphere – and yet unless you had looked in the last 70 years and were close enough, you wouldn’t have found any intelligent life,” he said.
“The fact that we look at one star system and don’t find a signal doesn’t tell you that there’s no intelligent life.”
Reference:
H. Rampadarath, J. S. Morgan, S. J. Tingay, C. M. Trott, (2012). The First Very Long Baseline Interferometric SETI Experiment.
