Is there life on other planets? This is one question that has always made humans think about life in outer space. From time to time, to satisfy this curiosity, projects are also being conducted by scientists, like NASA's Exoplanet, to find unmistakable signs of current life on a planet beyond Earth.
According to an article in the Universe Today, in a recent study submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a pair of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) examined the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations intercepting outward transmissions from NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) that are aimed at five deep space spacecraft: Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. Members of the public are free to track such transmissions at DSN Now, which displays real-time data on outgoing and incoming transmissions to all spacecraft at various times.
"This work [the 2019 study] identifies the stars that interstellar spacecraft will closely encounter on their paths through the universe," Derrick recently told Universe Today.
"Our paper expands upon this idea by identifying which stars the terrestrial transmissions to interstellar spacecraft will encounter. These transmissions cover a wider volume of the surrounding universe, meaning they will encounter more stars. Additionally, the transmissions from Earth travel much faster than the spacecraft themselves, so we would expect potential intelligent life to notice and return transmissions much sooner."
"Our results include five total stars for which we could expect returned transmissions within the 21st century and seven total stars for which we could expect returned transmissions within the next 100 years," Derrick tells Universe Today.
"Although this is obviously a very small number compared to all the stars in the surrounding universe, the fact that there is even a small chance intelligent life surrounding these stars could recognise human transmissions and communicate back to us within our lifetimes is very exciting."
The researchers also said that they don't think that humans are alone in the universe.
"Indeed, the pursuit of these types of questions, including our recent discovery that one of the five stars like the Sun has a planet like the Earth, has only been possible with modern technology," Dr Isaacson said.
"We now have the capability of detecting technology from a distant civilization, and that is really profound. This study is a contribution to that pursuit. It has not been that long in history-only 400 years-since Giordano Bruno suggested that other worlds like the Earth may orbit other stars. That claim did not go well for him. Now we have scientific evidence of such worlds, and we are pursuing the next great discovery: intelligent life beyond the Earth."
