It appears that E.T. might be phoning home after all, as a new scientific study suggests that aliens could be tapping into radio communications sent from Earth – and we can find them
Scientists think aliens could hack into our radio systems – and using that same system, we might be able to locate them. A new study suggested that communications with our spacecraft and rovers could be intercepted.
In order to control a Mars rover from Earth, scientists have to send powerful transmissions towards neighbouring planets in our Solar System. As a result, the target planet doesn’t receive all of the radio waves sent in its direction. Some of the signal would continue into the cosmos, lost forever.
However, those ever-expanding radio signals, could be picked up by other solar systems, and caught by alien life.
Pennsylvania State University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looked into the theory and said that alien life has a 77% chance of being in line of one of the radio waves sent into the cosmos.
Pinchen Fan, astronomer at Penn State, said in the study: “Based on data from the last 20 years, we found that if an extraterrestrial intelligence were in a location that could observe the alignment of Earth and Mars, there’s a 77% chance that they would be in the path of one of our transmissions – orders of magnitude more likely than being in a random position at a random time”.
The team doing the study looked over decades of logs from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which is used to communicate with rovers in space.
Because our Solar System’s planets orbit within a plane, aliens located in a place that lined up with that plane’s edge would have the best chance of listening in.
Perhaps most intriguingly, scientists think we could flip this, meaning Earth could tap into alien signals being sent from the solar system. According to experts, there is a clear way to experiment this by looking at neighbouring planets who share the same plane.
There, boffins could examine radio waves to see if they can catch communications from alien civilisations.
The study continued: “However, because we are only starting to detect a lot of exoplanets in the last decade or two, we do not know many systems with two or more transiting exoplanets.
“With the upcoming launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we expect to detect a hundred thousand previously undetected exoplanets, so our potential search area should increase greatly”.
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