Scientists Are Expanding the Search for Alien Signals to New Radio Frequencies
Scientists around the world have spent decades pointing radio telescopes at the sky, hoping to catch that one signal proving we’re not alone in the universe. But now researchers at SETI are asking: what if aliens have already reached out, and we accidentally left them hanging? A new study led by University of Manchester researcher Louisa Mason and presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting suggests it’s time to stop obsessing over one tiny slice of the radio spectrum and start checking as many of them as we can. Maybe there’s some vast alien civilization out there that’s been calling a phone we couldn’t hear ringing because we weren’t paying attention to it. For quite some time now, SETI has focused on the “water hole,” a range of low-end radio frequencies between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. Scientists figured any civilization that understands chemistry would recognize the frequencies emitted by hydrogen and hydroxyl (aka wat...