A professor at the University of Rochester, along with a team of researchers, has received a NASA grant that will allow them to develop a new strategy to the Seek for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (SETI).

"SETI has all the time confronted the problem of determining the place to look," said Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "Now we all know the place to look. We've 1000's of exoplanets together with planets within the liveable zone the place life can kind."

Finding any type of life outside of our own would be game-changing. It would mean we were never alone in the Universe, which actually narrows down one of those numbers in the Drake equation, the number of plants that harbor life.

Searching for alien life has been performed using two facets: by way of biosignatures and radio alerts. The former relies on indicators similar to microbes, and the latter is a presumed commonality made by intelligent life in space. Prof. Frank and his team's strategy is to search for "technosignatures," a term to describe indicators of technological activity.

To start, the team will start looking for two kinds of technosignatures: pollution and solar panels. Pollution is a sign of industrial or chemical activities. If the atmosphere of a particular exoplanet is found to have a presence of air pollution, it would counsel the presence of trade and other economic activities. It's possible to find synthetic gases like CFCs, which are not naturally-occurring gases.

As for solar panels, it lies in the fact that stars are the largest sources of energy in the Universe, which could only mean that like us, any intelligent alien race would attempt to harness their energy. Frank and his team are looking for reflections off solar panels. Other technosignatures up for consideration are artificial satellites and megastructures.

The grant will allow the group to discover the wavelength bands that will serve proof of these two technosignatures that will be used when investigating the list of exoplanets with the highest potential of supporting life.

If you are asking why haven't we looked for these factors before, the answer isn't that complicated to understand. We have only found out about the 4,000 exoplanets within recent years, and more recently, which of these planets are actually habitable.

Frank and his team will use the grant to produce a library of technosignatures, which will eventually become the standard in identifying which exoplanets are habitable and which are not.