Murchison telescope searches stars but finds no alien life

Do you want to believe? The search for extraterrestrial life goes on, but if you’re interested in it, you’ll have to wait for more proof — at least for now. And a large telescope in the region is helping establish that. CSIRO and Curtin University astronomers Dr Chenoa Tremblay and Professor Steven Tingay used the Murchison Widefield Array to explore space for “technosignatures”, powerful radio emissions that could indicate intelligent life was out there. The telescope is so powerful, it was able to search hundreds of times more of space for extraterrestrial life than previous searches, searching around the Vela constellation of stars in the southern sky. It found that, in this part of the universe at least, it appears other civilisations are elusive, if they exist. “The MWA is a unique telescope, with an extraordinarily wide field-of-view that allows us to observe millions of stars simultaneously,” Dr Trembley said. Professor Tingay 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’,” he said. “And 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.” He said with the larger Square Kilometre Array telescope due to be built at the same site as the telescope, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, but 50 times more sensitive, researchers would be able to look for technosignatures in billions of star systems, “With the SKA, we’ll be able to survey billions of star systems, seeking technosignatures in an astronomical ocean of other worlds.” The data the researchers found has been published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.