Astronomers have launched a historic search to find alien life in the universe, scanning 10 million stars – and found nothing.
The search, which researchers claim was larger than any that had occurred before, surveyed a patch of the universe in the hope of finding radio emissions that could come from aliens.
These "technological signatures" consist of powerful bursts of radio frequencies similar to those emitted by an FM radio, and thus could indicate that they come from an intelligent civilization.
But the researchers heard nothing from this patch of sky, which was located around the constellation Vella.
The scan lasted 17 hours, with researchers saying it was 100 times wider and deeper than previous similar searches for aliens. The survey used the Murchison Widefield Array, or MWA, a large telescope located in the interior of Western Australia.
However, astronomers said that while they may be disappointed not to have detected an alien civilization, they were not surprised by the result.
The survey only examined a relatively small patch of the sky, and it is highly likely that extraterrestrial life does not emit these kinds of radio signals.
As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, “space is big, very big,” said Steven Tingay, one of the astronomers involved in the project.
"And even though this was a very large study, the size of the space we looked at was equivalent to trying to find something in the Earth's oceans, but only searching in a large swimming pool," he continued.
"Since we really can't assume how alien civilizations might use technology, we have to look in many different ways."
Researchers hope to conduct similar searches using the Square Kilometer Array, a similar but much larger radio telescope that will allow them to detect radio signals from relatively nearby star systems and survey billions of potential stars.
