Scientists Are Looking for ‘Very Powerful’ Alien Life Hiding in Space

The idea that there’s life beyond that found on Earth just won’t go away. And if there’s one thing we can always count on, it’s that scientists are always exploring the idea.

The latest example comes via Newsmax. Which relayed that scientists are currently looking into alien life forms hidden in images from outer space.

This particular project is known as “Breakthrough Listen.” The concept is to see if alien communications can be found via the stars.

Or as the researchers explained it, one million stars are being scanned to see if “messages from the 100 closest galaxies to ours” can be heard.

Scientists Are Looking for Alien Life Hiding in Space

“I think for a while we’ve realized that when we make a SETI observation with a radio telescope, we are sensitive to not only the target star in the center of the field but also a patch of sky about the size of the moon — so that means we could potentially detect a signal from other objects in the field,” said Michael Garrett, who is the Sir Bernard Lovell chair of astrophysics at the University of Manchester and the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, per Vice.

Garrett is co-author of the study with Andrew Siemion, the director of the University of California-Berkley SETI Research Center. As well as the lead investigator for Breakthrough Listen.

“Other objects in the field include foreground stars and background stars in our own Milky Way,” Garrett said. “Until recently, we didn’t know how to make use of this fact because we didn’t know the distance to these stars.”

Translation: The scientists haven’t found anything yet. But it appears they suspect they might.

“Our data points are quite useful because although we are only sensitive to really powerful radio signals, the galaxies in a field contain a lot of stars, hundreds of billions, so it might just be possible that because we’re looking at so many stars we might get lucky and find a few of the very powerful signals that might be out there,” Garrett said.