Astronomers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Curtin University have used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope (pictured) to search for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars.
The search explored hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extra-terrestrial life.
The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, concluded that in this part of the Universe at least, other civilisations were elusive, if they existed at all.
Chenoa Tremblay, from the CSIRO, said the telescope was searching for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio frequencies, which could indicate the presence of an intelligent source.
“The MWA is a unique telescope, with an extraordinarily wide field-of-view that allows us to observe millions of stars simultaneously,” Dr Tremblay said.
“We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before. We found no ‘techno-signatures’ — no sign of intelligent life.”
Professor Steven Tingay, from Curtin University, said even though this was the broadest search yet, he was not shocked by the result.
“As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘space is big, really big’,” Professor Tingay said.
“Even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at 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.”
