Extraterrestrial

Could aliens be using supernovae explosions to get our attention ?

By T.K. Randall
February 19, 2024 ·  25 comments

Supernovae are major cosmic events. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) If there really are intelligent alien civilizations out there who want to communicate with us over vast distances, how exactly might they go about doing that ?

Assuming that they are unable to actually visit us directly and cannot send signals that travel faster than light, their options for getting in touch might seem just as limited as our own.

To find a way around this, astronomers at SETI have been looking for the cosmic equivalent of what are known as Schelling points - places where both parties might focus their efforts to communicate.

One example of a Schelling point here on Earth might be the entrance to a mall, a place where two people who got separated while shopping might go to realistically expect to find one another.In astronomy, an equivalent of this might be a supernova - an event so big, bright and unmissable that if anyone wanted to get our attention, it would be reasonable to assume that we would be looking in its direction.

Recently, astronomers from the Berkeley SETI Research Center, the University of Washington and the SETI Institute set out to scour the heavens for signs of alien technosignatures (or any sort of visible extraterrestrial beacon) within the vicinity of the supernova SN 1987A.

Their search sadly came up empty, but the premise of such a search still stands.

"This is a great demonstration of how we can prioritize our search efforts by considering what sorts of synchronization schemes other species might employ to get our attention," astronomer Jason Wright of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center told Gizmodo.

"It's a big sky, and anything we can do to narrow down our search space can only help the search for extraterrestrial technological species."

Source: Gizmodo | Comments (25)

Tags: Supernova, Alien