Late last year astronomers discovered a fascinating star system only 100 light years away from us. Neptune’s six subplanets orbit very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, attracting the attention of scientists searching for alien technology or technosignatures, which they claim would provide convincing evidence of advanced life beyond them. Soil.
To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system designated HD 110067. But researchers say the search isn’t over yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future.
The universe is in our own little pocket, radio waves satellites and telescopes beaming in our plane solar systemThis means that if someone from outside our solar system watched Earth pass in front of our sun, they might perhaps have picked up a signal coinciding with the planet’s transit.
Relating to: This rare exoplanet system has 6 ‘sub-Neptunes’ with mathematically perfect orbits.
HD 110067 is viewed edge-on from Earth, meaning we see the six planets in the plane of their respective systems; This image gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if it exists, study co-author Steve Croft, a radio astronomer with the life-searching Breakthrough Listen program at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com.
“Our technology from our own solar system has spread beyond Earth habitable zoneSo the tech-friendly civilization on HD 110067, if it exists, may have communications relays set up on multiple planets in the system, Croft told Space.com. “Even if it’s a negative result, it still tells us something.”
When the discovery of HD 110067 was announced, Croft and his team used the Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest fully steerable telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and its system searched for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for smoking signals, technosignatures unique to HD 110067, that are constantly present when the telescope is pointed at the system and absent when it is pointed away.
But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and humanity’s own technological signals, such as radio waves emitted from mobile phones connected to Wi-Fi. SpaceX‘S starlink satellite network low earth orbit. This creates a patchwork of signals where researchers search for the pin of a potential extraterrestrial signal, Croft said.
“I should add that we don’t know if there is a needle in the haystack,” he said. “We don’t really know what the needles look like.”
Despite the lack of sufficient information on what the alien technology looked like, the team used several techniques to ensure that the detected signal was not local interference. For example, if someone builds a transmitter in the hope that someone else will pick it up, that transmitter will pump a lot of energy into a narrow range of frequencies. Natural astrophysical events, by contrast, emit radio waves over a much wider range.
Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet orbiting an alien star would drift over time when observed from Earth, “much like the sound of an ambulance passing by would shift from very high to very low,” says the study’s lead author. Carmen Chozaas assistant researcher Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California told Space.com.
The search ultimately did not detect a technological signal; however, Croft tells us that the results do not rule out the presence of technosignatures in HD 110067, instead telling us that no signal was beamed in our direction during the observations.
Meanwhile, the discovery team is trying to refine the radii of the six planets detected. European Space Agency‘S CHEOPS Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago told Space.com that the space telescope and the masses of the planets were examined using the HARPS-N and CARMENES instruments in Spain.
Accurate data on the sizes and masses of the planets will shed more light on the chemical structure of the system. The team stated that using this information, it may be possible to learn the formation mechanisms by somehow “reverse engineering” the evolution of the system and the planets. shared Late last year.
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Scientists have long searched for life outside our solar system in hopes of learning about our place on Earth. UniverseIt tries to answer a question that has been pondered for thousands of years: “Are we alone?”
“Sometimes people ask me, ‘What are your chances of success in the next 10 years?'” Croft said. ” he asks. said. “My answer to that is, ‘I don’t know, but they are better than they have been in the last 10 years because our searches are getting stronger.’ time“
Croft echoed the words of SETI pioneer Jill Tarter: “We reserve the right to be smarter.”
This research is described as follows: paper It was published last month in the journal AAS Research Notes.