Could We Find Aliens By Detecting Solar Panels On A Distant Planet? | BBC Sky At Night Magazine

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Headlines:

• Scientists Discover Water Vapor on a Distant Exoplanet (The New York Times) • NASA's Parker Solar Probe Uncovers Never-Before-Seen Region of Solar Atmosphere (Space. com) • Astronomers Detect Radio Signals from the Mystery Star KIC 8462852 (The Guardian) • New Study Reveals Earth-Sized Exoplanet 80 Light-Years Away Could Potentially Support ___ (Science Daily) • NASA's TESS Mission Discovers 38 New Exoplanets... Including One That Could be Earth-Sized (Thomson Reuters) • The European Space Agency's Gaia Probe Maps the Milky Way with Unprecedented Accuracy (The Verge) • Researchers Use Machine Learning to Identify New Exoplanet Candidates in Data from the Kepler Space Telescope (Phys. org) • Scientists Discover New Type of Black Hole with a Mass Similar to That of the Sun (BBC News) • NASA's Artemis Mission Aims to Return Humans to the Moon by 2024 with the Help of Private Partners (CNBC) (Note: These bullet points are meant to provide a quick update on recent news in the field of space and astronomy... rather than analyzing or interpreting the findings in depth.)

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SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence , focuses on picking up signals that could be alien communication.

Ravi Kopparapu at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues have been looking into another option.

Our own civilisation is turning increasingly to renewable forms of energy and it would be reasonable for an environmentally aware alien civilisation to have done the same.

This idea was originally proposed by Manasvi Lingam, one of this study's authors, and Avi Loeb , but they didn't calculate how feasible it might be.

This means that when you use spectroscopy to look at solar panels, wavelengths at around 400nm and 1,000nm show distinctly as the reflectance leaps up.