'No sign' of alien technology after Australian telescope scans 10 million star systems

After scanning at least 10 million star systems for signs of alien technologies, a radio telescope in outback Western Australia has found no traces of extra-terrestrial life.

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope completed the exhaustive search at low frequencies - hundreds of times more broadly than any previous study.

Its findings, published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, observed the sky around the Vela constellation. The study revealed that other civilisations in the constellation appear elusive, if they exist at all.

"We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before," CSIRO astronomer Dr Chenoa Tremblay said.

"With this dataset, we found no technosignatures (scientific evidence of past or present technology) - no sign of intelligent life."

But another astronomer involved in the study - Professor Steven Tingay, from Curtin University - said he was not shocked by the results.

"As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 'space is big, really big'."

"And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth's oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool."

"Since we can't really assume how possible alien civilisations might utilise technology, we need to search in many different ways. Using radio telescopes, we can explore an eight-dimensional search space.

"Although there is a long way to go in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, telescopes such as the MWA will continue to push the limits – we have to keep looking."

The MWA is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, a remote and radio quiet astronomical facility built and maintained by CSIRO.

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