Monday, October 21, 2024

TRAPPIST Planets Bugged To Listen In On Alien Radio Comms

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If aliens are watching Earth, they might be able to detect us from the radio signals we beam to Mars to control our rovers there. Astronomers have now listened in on the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system to check whether aliens are chattering between their own neighboring planets.

Earth has been blasting out incidental radio signals for over a century now, but contrary to what sci-fi says, these are fairly weak and diffuse in space, so they'd be hard to detect from other planets. But what about those that are specifically designed to reach other planets?

Scientists at Penn State and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have now applied that logic to other star systems, to see if maybe we can find alien civilizations using this method. And where better to test the idea than TRAPPIST-1, located just 40 light-years away?

If so, the best time to pick up these signals would be when one planet passes in front of the other, from our perspective here on Earth. The team calls these events "planet-planet occultations," or PPOs. Radio signals could kind of "leak" around the back of the planet and reach us, like sunlight peeking around the shadow of the Moon during an eclipse.

The team used the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to scan the TRAPPIST-1 system for 28 hours. To identify signals most promising to be artificial, they specifically focused on narrowband radio signals of a certain strength, originating from TRAPPIST-1, which occurred during PPOs.

Still, it's not a complete wash out though. Longer observations of this and other systems, with more powerful instruments, could eventually pick up ET phoning home.

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