The Hunt for Advanced Civilizations in Alien Galaxies Comes Up with Nothing

First Posted: Apr 15, 2015 05:10 AM EDT
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The search for life in other galaxies continues. After a search of 100,000 galaxies, though, astronomers still haven't found an obvious signs of extraterrestrial life.

"The idea behind our researcher is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths-exactly the radiation that the WISE satellite was designed to detect for other astronomical purposes," said Jason Wright, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, spaceflight, communication or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths. This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on."

The researchers scoured almost the entire catalog of the WISE satellite's detections for objects consistent with galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation. Then, the researchers individually examined and categorized around 100,000 of the most promising galaxy images. Follow-up studies for the most promising 50 galaxies found that the origin of their radiation resulted from natural astronomical processes.

"Our results mean that, out of the 100,000 galaxies that WISE could see in sufficient detail, none of them is widely populated by an alien civilization using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes," said Wright. "That's interesting because these galaxies are billions of years old, which should have been plenty of time for them to have been filled with alien civilizations, if they exist. Either they don't exist, or they don't yet use enough energy for us to recognize them."

The findings reveal a bit more about our universe and shows that we may have to hunt a bit harder and look a bit further in order to find life on other planets.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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