Astronomers aim to find 'alien TV broadcasts'
US astronomers want to search for alien life by scouring space for extraterrestrial TV broadcasts.
The project would use a new radio telescope to look for signs of life from around 1,000 stars.
Previous programmes have tended to look for possible high-frequency beacon-like signals deliberately beamed across the universe.
They have avoided searching for lower frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum because of the potential for interference from Earth-based sources.
But the new scheme, proposed by a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in Massachusetts, would do just that, looking for “accidental leakage” from an alien civilisation of radio traffic similar to our own – such as military radar, television and FM radio broadcasts.
“Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilisations,” CfA theorist Avi Loeb said.
“This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilisation like ours among the stars.”
The team suggested using a new telescope being built in Australia, the Low Frequency Demonstrator of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA-LFD) to carry out their idea.
“The MWA-LFD is a science instrument intended to study the distant, young universe,” co-author Matias Zaldarriaga said.
“But by piggybacking onto its normal observations, SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers could use it to look for ET civilisations.”
The scientists said that if alien broadcasts were detected, additional observations could measure characteristics of the source planet, such as how fast it rotates or how long its year is.
That information could be combined with knowledge of the parent star, to estimate the temperature on the planet’s surface and assess whether it could have liquid water and life as we know it.
