As anyone who has ever tried to use a cell phone in a the middle of a wooded rural town knows, it can be difficult to hear someone trying to communicate with you if the signal is too weak, and that is the sort of problem that researchers are now trying to overcome on a cosmic scale.
In research published in the latest edition of the journal Astrobiology, scientists René Heller and Ralph Pudritz from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada are currently developing a way to ensure that we could detect weak signals that might be sent by extraterrestrial life forms that could be attempting to contact us from the far corners of the galaxy, or beyond.
While much of the effort centered around finding life on other worlds involve our efforts to reach out to those aliens, the study authors suggest that the best chance to make first contact could be to develop better ways of searching for those otherworldly signals instead of waiting and hoping that extraterrestrial civilizations someday hear us and respond.
As Heller and Pudritz explained in a statement, space researchers here on Earth spend most of their time trying to find planets and moons that are too far away to observe directly. Typically, these planets are studied by tracking their shadows and measuring the dimming of light as they transit or pass in front of their host stars during orbit.
Authors call for more intense monitoring of Earth’s transit zone
These observations can provide researchers with a vast array of information about other worlds, even those that cannot be seen directly. For instance, with measurements collected in this way, a team of scientists can estimate the average luminosity of the star, the temperatures on the surface of the planets, and whether or not they could maintain persistent surface water.
Using such techniques, scientists have identified dozens of potentially habitable planets, Heller and Pudritz said. But what if the same is true, and researchers on another world have detected the Earth using similar means, and have attempted to contact us? If their methods are similar to ours, they explained, we should begin intensely monitoring the region of space from which the Earth’s passage in front of the sun (also known as the “transit zone”) can be detected.
“It’s impossible to predict whether extraterrestrials use the same observational techniques as we do,” said Heller, an astrophysicist at the university’s Origins Institute. “But they will have to deal with the same physical principles as we do, and Earth’s solar transits are an obvious method to detect us.”
The transit zone is home to approximately 100,000 host stars which could potentially be orbited by habitable planets and moons, and there may be more that we have yet to detected, he and his colleague wrote. “If any of these planets host intelligent observers,” they added, “they could have identified Earth as a habitable, even as a living world long ago and we could be receiving their broadcasts today.”
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