Search for advanced civilizations beyond Earth finds nothing obvious in 100,000 galaxies

After searching 100,000 galaxies for signs of highly advanced extraterrestrial life, a team of scientists using observations from NASA's WISE orbiting observatory has found no evidence of advanced civilizations in them.

A false-colour image of the mid-infrared emission from the Great Galaxy in Andromeda, as seen by Nasa's WISE space telescope.  The orange colour represents emission from the heat of stars forming in the galaxy's spiral arms. The G-HAT team used images such as these to search 100,000 nearby galaxies for unusually large amounts of this mid-infrared emission that might arise from alien civilizations. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

"The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonised by an advanced space-faring 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," says Jason T. Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), who conceived of and initiated the research.

The research team's first paper about its Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies Survey (G-HAT), has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series on April 15, 2015.

Also among the team's discoveries are some mysterious new phenomena in our own Milky Way galaxy.

"Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, 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," Wright says. "This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on."

Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposed in the 1960s that advanced alien civilisations beyond Earth could be detected by the tell-tale evidence of their mid-infrared emissions. It was not until space-based telescopes like the WISE satellite that it became possible to make sensitive measurements of this radiation emitted by objects in space.

Roger Griffith, a post-baccalaureate researcher at Penn State and the lead author of the paper, scoured almost the entire catalog of the WISE satellite's detections -- nearly 100 million entries -- for objects consistent with galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation.

He then individually examined and categorised around 100,000 of the most promising galaxy images. Wright reports, "We found about 50 galaxies that have unusually high levels of mid-infrared radiation. Our follow-up studies of those galaxies may reveal if the origin of their radiation results from natural astronomical processes, or if it could indicate the presence of a highly advanced civilisation."

A false-colour image of the mid-infrared nebula surrounding the nearby star 48 Librae. This nebula was discovered in the course of the G-HAT survey using Nasa's WISE space telescope. The nebula is invisible in most kinds of light, including visible light. Credit: Roger Griffth (Penn State) / IPAC (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In any case, Wright says, the team's non-detection of any obvious alien-filled galaxies is an interesting and new scientific result. "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 civilisation using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes. 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 recognise them," Wright says .

"This research is a significant expansion of earlier work in this area," says Brendan Mullan, director of the Buhl Planetarium at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and a member of the G-HAT team. "The only previous study of civilizations in other galaxies looked at only 100 or so galaxies, and wasn't looking for the heat they emit. This is new ground."

Matthew Povich, an assistant professor of astronomy at Cal Poly Pomona, and a co-investigator on the project, says, "Once we had identified the best candidates for alien-filled galaxies, we had to determine whether they were new discoveries that needed follow-up study, or well-known objects that had a lot of mid-infrared emission for some natural reason." Jessica Maldonado, a Cal Poly Pomona undergraduate, searched the astronomical literature for the best of the objects detected as part of the study to see which were well known and which were new to science. "Ms. Maldonado discovered that about a half dozen of the objects are both unstudied and really interesting looking," Povich said.

A false-colour image of the mid-infrared emission from an unusual cluster of sources discovered in the course of the G-HAT survey using the Nasa's WISE space telescope. These sources are invisible in visible light.  The red objects may be a previously uncatalogued cluster of still-forming stars. Credit: Roger Griffth (Penn State) / IPAC (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"When you're looking for extreme phenomena with the newest, most sensitive technology, you expect to discover the unexpected, even if it's not what you were looking for," says Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and a co-investigator on the research team. "Sure enough, Roger and Jessica did find some puzzling new objects. They are almost certainly natural astronomical phenomena, but we need to study them more carefully before we can say for sure exactly what's going on."

Among the discoveries within our own Milky Way galaxy are a bright nebula around the nearby star 48 Librae, and a cluster of objects easily detected by WISE in a patch of sky that appears totally black when viewed with telescopes that detect only visible light. "This cluster is probably a group of very young stars forming inside a previously undiscovered molecular cloud, and the 48 Librae nebula apparently is due to a huge cloud of dust around the star, but both deserve much more careful study," Povich says.

"As we look more carefully at the light from these galaxies," said Wright, "we should be able to push our sensitivity to alien technology down to much lower levels, and to better distinguish heat resulting from natural astronomical sources from heat produced by advanced technologies. This pilot study is just the beginning."

The G-HAT survey was supported by a New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology grant, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.