Scientists at Curtin University in Australia have searched for signs of alien civilizations among 10 million stars in the constellation Sails. The research results are disclosed in an article published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
Astronomers searched for technosignatures (traces of extraterrestrial technology) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope, which operates in the 70-300 megahertz frequency range. However, no signs of the presence of aliens were found.
According to the researchers, the results show only that there are no technosignatures that could be recorded within the MWA radio band in the vicinity of the constellation Sails. The very search for traces of the activity of extraterrestrial civilizations is based on the assumption that aliens use technologies similar to those existing on Earth. In the case of MWA searches, this means civilizations must use the appropriate radio frequency range in order to be found.
The observations were carried out for 17 hours in the region of the sky, where there are (at different distances from the Earth) about 10 million stars. However, the Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars.
The absence of technosignatures does not necessarily mean the absence of alien civilizations. Radio waves become less intense as the distance increases, following the inverse square law. A hundred light-years away, radio signals emitted by the Earth become indistinguishable from cosmic noise. However, in the future, there should be more sensitive instruments capable of detecting radio signals from relatively close planetary systems.
