Searching the Skies for Alien Laser Beams
A new study scanned 5,600 stars for tiny emissions of light, which may be the best way for an extraterrestrial civilization to signal its existence.
In the last decade, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, has spent hours staring at the night sky in search of exoplanets and accumulating huge amounts of data about potential new worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way.
But maybe, Nate Tellis wondered, Keck might have picked up something else along the way. Somewhere in all that data, could there be a signal from an intelligent civilization trying to reach Earth?
Tellis is a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, where, as his LinkedIn biography puts it, he spends his daysin the , is the largest survey of its kind in the field of optical-based searches for extraterrestrial life.
