A Groundbreaking Search for Alien Technology in Distant Galaxies Has Begun

A group of astronomers kicked off the first search for signals from alien technology from galaxies beyond our own using a large radio antenna array in rural Australia.

The SETI Institute, the Berkeley SETI Research Center, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research launched the effort. The collaboration used the Murchison Widefield Array, a 4,096-antenna radio observatory in Western Australia, to make its observations. The array’s antennae look like squads of metal spiders arranged in grids; though not as grand as some large radio observatory dishes, the array is well-suited for radio observations of deep space.

The team’s study, currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv, took advantage of the array’s large field of view to scan 2,800 galaxies in a single observation. That distinguishes the recent study from previous searches, which have mostly focused on radio sources within our Milky Way. Stars within the Milky Way can range between 4 and 100,000 light-years away, while nearby galaxies can range between 2 million and 30 million light-years away, so the differences in scale are quite profound.

“One of the main challenges in searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence is the speed at which we can observe the sky,” the team wrote in the paper. “Even with the large FOV offered by aperture arrays like the MWA, dedicated experiments done on shared-use instruments limit how much of the sky we cover and how often we cover the same sources.”

According to a SETI Institute release, for an extraterrestrial civilization from a different galaxy to send a message that would be detectable on Earth, the civilization’s technology would need to be advanced enough to use its host star or several stars as power sources. That classification is based on the Kardashev scale of the advancement of intelligent life, which describes three base classes of civilizations and their level of advancement, as defined by the energy at their disposal.

The Western Australian array has been used in searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) before; in 2020, a sweeping search for alien signatures came up short. At the risk of stating the obvious, the recent search did not yield any technosignatures, or indications that extraterrestrials are out using their own tech. But you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!

The researchers noted that current and planned telescopes are increasing the speed of that search. Namely, the Very Large Array and the MeerKAT telescope will both help search for alien signals at radio wavelengths. I just hope aliens are familiar with standard radio communication protocols—”roger,” “over,” and so on. Otherwise we’ll be stuck in an Airplane-esque routine with extraterrestrials, when it’s bad enough with humans.