The deepest and broadest search for alien technology at low frequencies has been achieved by a radio telescope in outback Western Australia's, scanning an area of the sky known to contain at least 10 million stars.
To investigate hundreds of times more extensively than any prior search for extraterrestrial life, astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope. The study, published this month in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, studied the skies around the constellation Vela. Although, at least in this part of the world, it seems like other civilizations, whether they exist, remain elusive.
CSIRO astronomer Dr. Chenoa Tremblay and Professor Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), conducted the research.
Dr. Tremblay said the telescope was looking at frequencies close to FM radio waves for strong radio emissions that could suggest the existence of an intelligent source. Such potential emissions are referred to as 'technosignatures.'
"We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before," Dr. Tremblay said. "With this dataset, we found no technosignatures-no sign of intelligent life."
While this was the most comprehensive search yet, Professor Tingay said he was not surprised by the results.
And while this was a huge analysis, the amount of room they were looking at was comparable to attempting to locate something in the seas of the Earth, but just looking in a volume of water equal to a big backyard pool.
Since we can not even conclude how technology might be used by potential alien civilizations, we need to look in several different ways. We can explore an eight-dimensional search room using radio telescopes.
While the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence is a long way to go, telescopes such as the MWA will continue to push the boundaries-astronomers have to keep searching. The MWA is the predecessor to the next instrument, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an observatory with telescopes in Western Australia and South Africa.
The SKA, which will ultimately be the largest telescope in the world, will be installed in Australia at the same location and will have a site in South Africa as well. The intention is that SKA will be able to survey billions of radio-frequency star systems. It is also going to be 50 times more sensitive than the current MWA array.
The MWA is based at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, a remote astronomical laboratory facility and operated by CSIRO, the national science agency of Australia. The SKA will be designed at the same site and will be able to perform even deeper SETI experiments.
