The Wion News reports that scientists are attempting to attentively listen to the radio pulses coming from the centre of our galaxy in their most recent quest for extraterrestrial life. For a long time, they have been hunting through radio signals.
The new direction in the investigation of extraterrestrial life has been taken with the hypothesis that intelligent aliens could be lurking at the heart of our galaxy which is the Milky Way. Starts or pulsars that naturally emit narrow-frequency pulses are being used by humans as a deliberate source of technology like radar to get signals and channel them to collect information from outer space.
These pulses can stand out against the space‘s background radio noise; they are likely to be an effective way to communicate from such long distances. Scientists have also considered them as a good option to listen to while they hunt for alien civilizations. In the new volume of the Astronomical Journal, new studies and data have revealed that the scientists have explained the alien-hunting strategy and discussed the detailed ways they have adopted to collect the best information.
Researchers led by Cornell University graduate student Akshay Suresh have created software to identify repeating frequency patterns that have been tested on well-known pulsars recognised for taking up narrow space frequencies precisely. These frequency ranges have been very small but with their width being around a tenth of the frequencies that are generally used by an FM radio station, data are being retrieved very crucially. The researchers used this technique to search the data obtained from the West Virginia Green Bank Telescope.
According to research by co-author Vishal Gajjar of the SETI Institute, radio SETI has up until this point focused mostly on looking for continuous transmissions. He claims that the research highlights the astounding energy effectiveness of a sequence of pulses as a form of interplanetary communication over extremely large stretches of space. Additionally, this work is the first-ever thorough effort to undertake in-depth searches for these signals.
There have been put forward several reasons as to why scientists are targeting our Milky Way’s centre as the source of retrieving these signals. Researchers have concentrated on the signals coming from its centre since it is teeming with stars and exoplanets that could be habitable. If intelligent aliens are present at the core of our galaxy, they may wish to reach out to other galaxies as well. They also may send signals across a wide range of planets as they are at the centre of the Milky Way. Huge data have been retrieved from Breakthrough Listen and the techniques used by Akshay provide a new method to help us search the Haystack for needles that could provide tantalizing evidence regarding extraterrestrial life forms. This was reported from the studies by co-author and project scientist with the Breakthrough Listen program Steve Croft.
The signals from pulsars stand out against the background radio noise of space, making them an intriguing target for listening and an efficient means of communication across great distances while searching for alien civilizations. The barrow bandwidths and repeated patterns could be a prime way for aliens to reveal themselves; as such a combination is extremely unlikely to occur naturally. The process employs an algorithm that can browse 1.5 million samples of telescope data in 30 minutes. The speed of the algorithm later in their study will help them improve searches for the future.