Astronomers look to artificial light to advance search for life out there
07 Nov 2011
Astronomers say that looking for light from cities like our own could provide a new way to search for advanced life on distant planets. They say this could help in the search for intelligent extraterrestrials.
According to Abraham Loeb and Edwin Turner of Harvard and Princeton universities, respectively, the method would open up a new window in the search for extraterrestrial civilisations.
The hunt for planets that could potentially host intelligent life has turned up 687 candidates as of yesterday. The hope is that there may, somewhere in the vast expanse of space, be a second home for mankind, an earth-like planet that might harbour life similar to that on earth.
But how best could we search for that home out there? Loeb and Turner believe powerful telescopes could help us detect artificial light originating from the dark side of these planets could help.
They have proposed how this could be done, in a research paper submitted to the journal Astrobiology, fanciful though the idea might first seem. They say sunlight has a different signature to artificial light so it would quiet easy to differentiate between the two.
Telescopes today can analyse the light received from objects even located at the very edge of our solar system 7.5 billion km away.
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