REAL LIFE NEWS: A DIFFERENT WAY TO SPOT ALIENS
by Hazed
An astronomer has come up with a new way to detect alien life on extra-solar planets. Instead of looking for massive buildings on the surface, or spaceships zooming around alien star systems, he says we should look for space junk orbiting around distant exoplanets.
Research by Socas-Navarro, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, suggests that fleets of satellites in orbit around planets could be sufficiently dense that we could detect them from Earth using current technologies. He says that a ring of satellites together with accumulating space junk should produce a characteristic light curve signature when an alien planet passes in front of its star – the transit method of detection.
It’s an intriguing idea. The transit method has been used to detect hundreds of exoplanets over the past thirty years, and with new massive telescopes coming online soon our ability to detect them will only get better.
Source: https://gizmodo.com/we-should-search-for-aliens-by-looking-for-their-space-1826670642
