Astronomers Scan 11,680 Nearby Stars for Signals from Advanced Civilizations - by spacewriter
The “microwave window” as seen from Earth. This is the frequency range through which we might be able to detect technosignatures from distant advanced civilizations. Courtesy: NASA.
It’s no surprise that communications across the gulfs of space are difficult. There’s a time lag, of course. A signal we send to Proxima Centauri saying “Howdy” would take just over four years to get there at the speed of light. If anybody exists there, they’d sent a “Hi neighbor” back to us—again at the speed of light. Of course, it takes another four years or so to travel between us. That’s 8 years to establish a connection.
In other words, they wanted to exclude natural emissions from the sample. Those would be radio signals created by naturally occurring events and objects. In our own Solar System, for example, Jupiter has strong radio emissions. So does the Sun, and Earth does, too, for that matter, but we can exclude those easily. Outside of the Sun and planets, pulsars give off strong signals, as do star-forming regions, and supernova remnants.
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