Extraterrestrial life is life that exists and originates outside our planet Earth, the only place in the universe currently known by humans to support life.
This is the artist’s rendering shows a hypothetical distant world inhabited by intelligent aliens. The Mileura Wide-Field Array will be able to “eavesdrop” for unintentional signals from any such worlds within 30 light-years of Earth. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Now, astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars.
From the article:
The question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere is one of the fundamental unknowns about our Universe. Over the past decade more than 200 extra-solar planets have been discovered, providing new urgency for addressing this question in these or other planetary systems. Independently of this perspective, new radio observatories for cosmology are currently being constructed with the goal of detecting 21cm emission from cosmic hydrogen in the redshift range 6
