Scientists think we’ve spent decades looking for the wrong kind of alien radio signals

We’ve been wondering if we are all alone in the universe for thousands of years. It hasn’t been until recently that we began a determined search of the heavens to see if extraterrestrial life is emitting radio signals.

However, except for the unexplained “Wow!” signal picked up in 1977, it’s been radio silence. But according to recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, that may be because we may be looking for the wrong kind of signal.

Tuning in to the right signal to find E.T.

Typically, astronomers are on the lookout for very narrowband signals. These sharp spikes of a few hertz in a radio emission’s power don’t occur naturally, “so, if you see something very narrowband, you know that it is from something of interest,” Evan Keane, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin, told Live Science.

Vishal Gajjar and Grayce C. Brown argue in their study that astronomers should be looking for a broader spike as their research found that space weather from the home star of any potentially alien inhabited solar system could be distorting their radio signals. The charged particles, radiation and plasma winds emitted by stars can spread out radio signals from a planet.

“SETI searches are often optimized for extremely narrow signals. If a signal gets broadened by its own star’s environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it’s there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we’ve seen in technosignature searches,” explained Dr. Vishal Gajjar, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper, in a statement.

They reached their conclusion by analyzing the effect of space weather caused by the Sun on radio transmissions from spacecraft that we’ve sent out to explore our own solar system. They then extrapolated those observations to other stellar environments.

One promising place to look for life is around M-dwarfs given that some have been around for an exceptionally long time, allowing for the development of advanced civilizations. This type of star makes up three-quarters of the billions of stars in the Milky Way but the space weather they produce is more likely to broaden any radio signals that leave those solar systems.

“By quantifying how stellar activity can reshape narrowband signals, we can design searches that are better matched to what actually arrives at Earth, not just what might be transmitted,” noted Grayce C. Brown, co-author of the study and research assistant at the SETI Institute, in a statement.

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