Scientists Looking for ‘Very Powerful’ Alien ‘Transmitters’ Hiding In Space Images…

Image: Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty ImagesThe search for intelligent life in the universe is getting a major boost from the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, which is the most comprehensive attempt ever to detect alien communications and technologies. Funded by billionaire Yuri Milner, the initiative is currently scanning one million stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way, for signs of alien civilizations.Now, a pair of scientists have demonstrated that this huge ongoing survey might serendipitously capture signs of aliens in even more remote locations, such as galaxies that appear in the background of images that are focused on stars in the Milky Way. AdvertisementThese extragalactic objects are not the main targets of Breakthrough Listen, but they could help constrain “the prevalence of very powerful extraterrestrial transmitters,” according to a new study posted on the preprint server arxiv that is co-authored by Michael Garrett, who is the Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester and the director of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics, and Andrew Siemion, the director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen.“I think for a while we’ve realized that when we make a SETI observation with a radio telescope, we are sensitive to not only the target star in the center of the field but also a patch of sky about the size of the Moon—so that means we could potentially detect a signal from other objects in the field,” Garrett said in an email to Motherboard. “Other objects in the field include foreground stars and background stars in our own Milky Way,” he continued. “Until recently, we didn’t know how to make use of this fact because we didn’t know the distance to these stars.” Fortunately, the European Space Agency launched a space telescope called Gaia in 2013 that has been rapidly filling in this critical information gap by measuring the positions, distances and motions of about one billion astronomical objects. AdvertisementSign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.The Gaia mission has permitted us to measure distances to a few billion stars in the Milky Way so …