by Late last year, astronomers he discovered an interesting star system only 100 light year away from us. Six sub-Neptune planets circle very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, sparking the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures, which they argue offer compelling evidence of life. advanced beyond. World.
To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system, known as HD 110067. However, the researchers say they are not done looking yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future.
In our own tiny pocket of the cosmos, radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in our plane Solar systemmeaning that if someone outside our solar system were to see Earth crossing the face of our sun, they might be able to pick up a signal that matches the planet’s motion.
Related: This rare exoplanet system has 6 ‘sub-Neptunes’ with mathematically perfect orbits
HD 110067 is observed at the edge of the Earth, so we can see all six planets in the plane of their system – a view that gives us an excellent chance of picking up such a signal if there is one, study co-author Steve Croft, astronomer said radio working with the Breakthrough Listen program that is searching for life at the University of California, Berkeley, with Space.com
“Our technology in our own solar system has spread beyond the habitable zone” Croft told Space.com. So a technology-friendly civilization in HD 110067 may have multiplanet-based communication relays in the system, he said. “Even if it’s a negative result, that tells us still something. .”
When the discovery of HD 110067 was announced, Croft and his team used the world’s largest fully steerable telescope, the Greenbank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and searched the system for signs of alien technology. The researchers looked for signs that were continuously present when the telescope was aimed at the system and were absent when it was ordered, the smoking gun of local technosignatures for HD 110067.
But such signals are difficult to distinguish from natural sources of radio waves and from humanity’s own technological signals, such as radio waves beamed from Wi-Fi-connected cell phones, SpaceXand Constellation satellite network i low earth orbit. This creates a haystack of signals in which researchers look for the needle of a possible extraterrestrial signal, Croft said.
“I should say we don’t know if there are needles in the haystack,” he said. “We don’t really know what the needles look like.”
Despite this lack of knowledge of what alien technology looks like, the team used a number of techniques to ensure that a detected signal was not local interference. For example, if someone built a transmitter in the hope that someone else would pick it up, that transmitter would pump a lot of energy into a narrow range of frequencies. natural astrophysical phenomena, in contrast, beam radio waves over a much wider range.
Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet orbiting an alien star would arrive in time when viewed from Earth, “the same way when an ambulance passes you, the sound goes from very high to very low,” lead author of the study. Carmen Chozaassistant researcher at the Search for External Information (SETI) Institute in California, said Space.com.
Ultimately the search did not find a techno signal – however, the results do not rule out techno signatures in HD 110067, Croft said, but they do tell us that there was no signal sent in our direction at the time of the observations.
Meanwhile, the discovery team is filtering the rays of the six detected planets using the European Space Agencyand CHEOPS space telescope, and the masses of the planets using the HARPS-N and CARMENES instruments in Spain, Rafael Luque of the University of Chicago told Space.com.
Accurate data on the sizes and masses of the planets would shed more light on the chemical composition of the system. Using that information, it might be possible to “reverse engineer” a bit the evolution of the system and its planets to learn their formation mechanisms, the team was 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 the universeby trying to answer one 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?'” said Croft. “My answer to that is, “well, I don’t know, but they’re better than they’ve been in the last 10 years because our search is getting all powerful. time.”
Croft echoed the words of SETI pioneer Jill Tarter: “We reserve the right to be smarter.”
This research is described in a paper published last month in the AAS Research Notes journal.
