Still No Aliens

Astronomers (and others) have been searching for aliens for many years, but so far, none have turned up. Radio telescopes are now able to search millions of stars at a time looking for "technosignatures" - radio signals that would indicate the presence of a technological civilization.

Unfortunately, the latest such search has come up blank. 

The astronomers were searching for radio waves between 98 and 128 MHz, as these “narrow band signals” are “consistent with radio transmissions from intelligent civilizations,” according to the new study. Of course, we remain the only intelligent civilization known to produce these sorts of radio signals, but aliens, if they exist, likely produce them as well.

This latest SETI endeavor was conducted in January 2018 and included a region of space known to contain at least six exoplanets. To date, MWA has examined 75 known exoplanets at low frequencies.

The new search, which included over 10 million stars, was “orders of magnitude” higher than previous MWA surveys, as the authors wrote. From the 30 hours of observation, 17 were “free from imaging artifacts likely caused due to the instrument being actively worked on during the day, while the observations were taken at night.”

The null result is not entirely surprising, as the volume of space surveyed by the astronomers is still exceptionally small. In the press release, Tingay said it “was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.”