Scientists are looking for extraterrestrial life beyond our solar system for decades. Now scientists looking inward and toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

They want to find the answer to the question “Could intelligent life (aliens) be lurking at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy?”

Recent research for extraterrestrial life aims to find out by listening for radio pulses from the center of our galaxy. Narrow-frequency pulses are naturally emitted by stars called pulsars, but they’re also used deliberately by humans in technology such as radar.

Because these pulses stand out against the background radio noise of space, they’re an effective way of communicating across long distances and an appealing target to listen for when searching for alien civilizations that scientists are looking for for a very long time.

In a new study, published May 30 in The Astronomical Journal, Scientists described the alien-hunting strategy Researchers led by Cornell University graduate student Akshay Suresh developed software to detect these repetitive frequency patterns and tested it on known pulsars to be sure it could pick up the narrow frequencies.

These frequency ranges are very small, at about a tenth of the width of frequencies used by a typical FM radio station. these types of researchers then searched data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia using the method.

The researchers are listening into the middle of the Milky Way because it is dense with stars and potentially habitable exoplanets. What’s more, if intelligent aliens at the core of the Milky Way wanted to reach out to the rest of the galaxy, they could send signals sweeping across a wide array of planets, given their privileged position at the center of the galaxy.

Using narrow bandwidths and repeated patterns would be a prime way for aliens to reveal themselves, as such a combination is extremely unlikely to occur naturally, study co-author Steve Croft, a project scientist with the Breakthrough Listen program, said in a separate statement. 

The method uses an algorithm that can search through 1.5 million telescope data samples in 30 minutes. Though researchers did not find any telltale signs in their first search, they say that the speed of the algorithm will help improve searches in the future.

(ref-LiveScience)