The biggest EVER scientific search for ALIENS outside our galaxy | Breakthrough Listen Project

are we alone in the universe that is perhaps one of the biggest questions that humankind has ever asked it might sound a little bit sci-fi but there are legitimate scientific research studies that are doing extensive searches of the night sky for signs of Life out there in the universe and this month the latest results from one of those projects breakthrough listen was published by chosa and collaborators reporting on their hunt for life outside of our own galaxy The Milky Way and instead looking for extra Galactic life life that exists in other galaxies of stars in the universe now there's two main ways that you can go about looking for signs of life you can either look for what are known as bio signatures or biomarkers or you can look for what's known as techno signatures now bio signatures or biomarkers are like the natural signs that life is present somewhere on a planet so for example like an element or a molecule that can only be produced by the chemistry of life is found in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star in our galaxy that's what people are using the James web Space Telescope to try and do try and find the fingerprints that those molecules leave behind on the light as it passes through a planet's atmosphere I've made a whole video before on this channel what molecules specifically we're looking for with jdst if you want to check that out I'll link it in the video description down below now those bios signatures could be from any form of life whether that's like singled celled organisms or plant life or an advanced very intelligent civilization but if we ever find one of these biomarkers in a planet's atmosphere like fits this bill could only be produced by life then we won't necessarily know what kind of life we found and if it's Advanced or in intelligent in any way but this research paper by choser and collaborators has been hunting for techno signatures signs of a technologically advanced civilization through the signals that they're giving off into outer space think about the Earth for example and all those communication signals that come from the ground up to satellites in orbit or even space probes that are you know are orbiting other planets those signals are being sent out in all directions we are a Communications Beacon for anyone out there in the universe that might be listening and paying attention so there are also projects here on Earth that make sure that we are also paying attention to the universe around us to also you see if there are other planets that are these beacons of communications giving out these techn signatures now a lot of these projects fall under the banner of seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and of their biggest current projects is breakthrough listen a 10year project with a100 million of funding that was set up back in 2015 as part of the Breakthrough Foundation yep the same one that funds like the Breakthrough prizes in maths physics and life science a lot of the research scientists on the project are based over in Berkeley in California in the US but the international headquarters for the whole project have just moved to right here in Oxford and as part of that breakthrough listen project there have been numerous researches for techno signatures specifically from stars and planets in our own Milky Way galaxy but sadly to no avail the problem that these searches have is that the Milky Way has almost a 100 billion stars so monitoring all of them for techno signatures even the ones that are just visible to us is practically impossible you know the funding for this project pays for the time to use the Greenbank telescope in West Virginia and the park observatory in New South Wales in Australia but even if you had funding for 200 telescopes not just two telescopes you still wouldn't be able to monitor all of the stars that are visible to us in the night sky in the Milky Way so there could be some signals that we are missing now choser and collaborators point out that by searching instead for extra Galactic techno signatures you can observe all of the billions of stars in one Galaxy at a single time meaning you can cover a much larger area of the universe billions of stars at once now of course if you're going to detect any sort of techn signature at those incredible distances between us and even just nearby galaxies at Millions to billions of light years away the signal that you are going to detect has to be incredibly incredibly energetic and bright meaning that in these kind of extra Galactic technos signature studies you'll only be able to detect a techn signature from what's known as a tight to kardashev Civilization now the kardashev scale is a hypothetical scale that we could use to measure the technological advancement of a civilization you know based on the amount of energy that they need to use to actually power their society it was first proposed back in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai kardashev and they have three main classes of civilization a type one cev civilization would be able to use all the energy available to it on the home planet whereas type 2 cev civilization would be able to use all the energy output by a planet's star presumably using something like a Dyson Sphere which again is something that's completely hypothetical if you think about like if you could put solar panels over the entirety of the Earth's surface to you know absorb the sun's light and turn it into energy you'd still only be taking like a tiny little bit of the sunlight that's actually emitted by the Sun that like the Earth's area intersects with instead if you imagine building like this huge huge spherical construction around the entire sun and then putting like solar panels all on the inside to absorb its energy then that's kind of how you can imagine Dyson's fear and then a type three cev civilization is able to use all the energy available from every object in its Galaxy so all the stars dust gas black holes that are glowing Earth is not even a type one kardashev civilization right we're too entrenched in using damaging fossil fuels to actually our full potential of using all the energy that's available to us on the planet so when we're searching for techno signatures in other galaxies we're searching for civilizations that are way way way more advanced than ours is but what are we actually searching for we use telescopes on the ground that detect Long Radio wavelengths of light like the ones that we use to communicate with on Earth as well and we're looking for signals that are emitted at very specific frequencies of of light that look artificial so astronomical objects like stars for example also give out radio wavelengths of light but when they do they give it off a huge range of wavelengths or frequencies but if we see a very bright signal that's being emitted only a very specific frequency of light that we also know isn't a frequency that like for example hydrogen will a meta then we can be pretty sure that what we're seeing is artificial plus if if you're going to get a signal like that from a planet then this signal will also undergo something known as Doppler drift the frequency that we see will change with time as the planet orbits its star and moves towards us on its orbit squishing the wavelength of light and increasing the frequency and then moves away from us on its orbit around the star stretching out the wavelength of light and making the frequency lower it's the same thing that happens to sound waves from an ambulance siren as it races towards and away from you we hear that squashing and stretching of the sound wave as a pitch change now the problem is there's lots of sources of interference when you look for artificial signals cuz we also use radio waves here on Earth to communicate and there's different frequencies that have been set aside for specific areas to use like for example GPS or air traffic control or Communications satellites or even n deep space Network that communicates with space missions like the robers on Mars like perseverance or the Voyager probes that are way past the edge of the solar system so it means that you could detect this you know very bright signal that is all at one frequency but it's actually coming from a satellite and not from an actual you know alien civilization out there in the universe so what choser and collaborators did to actually double check that what they're seeing is real rather than interference is that they would point at the Galaxy for 5 minutes and then look somewhere else for 5 minutes and then come back to the Galaxy for 5 minutes and then look somewhere else for 5 minutes and then come back again for 5 minutes and then look somewhere else for 5 minutes and if that signal is real when you look away from the Galaxy the signal should disappear and when you come back it should reappear as opposed to interference which should be there throughout the entire observation whether you're on or off source of the Galaxy that you're looking at so this is what choser and collaborators did with observations of 97 galaxies over over 5 years giving a total 229 hours of observing time which gave them 1440 terabytes of data that's like the equivalent in size to a 5year long like 1080p HD video so it's a huge amount of data that they had to search through for these techno signatures they actually wrote a computer algorithm that would look through the data and pull out any signals that looked promising and had this Doppler drift Behavior the algorithm had over 6 million hits that looked like it had Doppler drift but then they had another algorithm to search through those 6 million hits to check if the signal was actually real or not looking to see if it disappeared when they moved away from the Galaxy for those 5 minutes and if it came back again that left them with just 1, 1519 possible real Doppler drift techno signatures across their 97 galaxies those 1,500 signals were then individually inspected by the members of the team to work out if they were actually real or not and sadly in the end all of them were put down to radio frequency interference or RFI so no evidence for any type 2 kardashev civilizations at least in the 97 galaxies that chos are in collabor ators looked at however there could be a possibility that some signals have been missed in that huge amount of data that they have because no computer algorithm is perfect because it's coded up by imperfect humans and I'm sure there are many of you sat at home right now just screaming at the screen for them to use Ai and yeah that is the next natural step here for that research but it's worth pointing out that's a lot more difficult than you you know might expect given the ubiquity of AI tools sort of in modern life right now because if you were going to have an AI or ml algorithm that would do this then you would need to actually train it on real data first so it would know what to look for in the huge data set that you gave it and we don't have any of these real techno signatures with Doppler drifts to actually train a machine on or we have an artificial signals that we can create with simulations so it's so it's going to take some time and some clever thinking to be able to do this but what I really think that this research highlights so clearly is the impact of radio interference on groundbased radio observatories like look at those numbers again there was over six million hits in the data of artificiall looking radio signals but every single one of them just turned out to be radio frequency interference like that's a huge number to deal with and if we think about these Mega constellations of satellites that are going up now the likes of starlink for example like we talk a lot in the astronomy Community about the impact of starlink on groundbased telescopes that use visible light to look at the universe but we don't talk enough about their impact on radio telescopes because if these Mega constellations are just going to keep getting bigger like starlink now for example has 5,000 satellites in orbit but the plan is for them to have 12,000 satellites in orbit eventually like this problem is only going to get worse so our algorithms that search through this data are going to need to get better at removing all of this background noise and spotting it for what it is so that we don't miss the signals and the data that we're actually interested in whether that is techno signatures from Advanced civilizations or something more natural of something just like going bump in the night out there in the universe So This research by choser and collaborators although a negative result on techno signatures you know there's still no alien civilizations out there that we know of yet it will help pave the way forward for the continued operation of groundbased radio telescopes and observatories in today's modern world before we get to the bloopers would you like a fun 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in the video description down below and the first 200 of you that do are going to get 20% off an annual premium subscription so thank you so much to brilliant for the continued support of this Channel and now roll those blers now these bio signatures could a hair somewhere in my mouth and it's bugging me I'm sure you can't see it on camera but I'm like what if you can signs of a technic Technic Technologic Advanced I think I wanted to put like an extra c in there then like technologically so the kardashev scale is a hypothetical scale that we use to measure the technological I did it again technological Nikolai kardashev and they have three main classes of civilization which I just want to point out right I feel like the' 60s was like prime time for just like I'm just going to write down this random idea and everyone will name it after me and it'll be great funding that was set in 2015 as part of the Breakthrough Foundation that's enough foundations but I can't

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 442,254

Keywords: space, dr becky, astronomy, astronomie, aliens, scifi, sci-fi, technosignatures, biosignatures, JWST, james webb space telescope, james web, science, physics, astrophysics, dr becky smethurst, dr becki, dr beccy, doctor becky, alien life, universe, cosmos

Id: 2RQWiJ0x_R4

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2023