“Which stars do you point your telescope at and look for signals? Now we know where to look. “SETI has always faced the challenge of figuring out where to look,” Frank says. The grant will allow Frank, along with collaborators Jacob-Haqq Misra from the international nonprofit organization Blue Marble Space, Manasvi Lingam from the Florida Institute of Technology, Avi Loeb from Harvard University, and Jason Wright from Pennsylvania State University, to produce the first entries in an online technosignature library.Ī civilization, by nature, will need to find a way to produce energy, and, Frank says, “there are only so many forms of energy in the universe. This is the first NASA non-radio technosignature grant ever awarded and represents an exciting new direction for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The grant will fund his study of technosignatures-detectable signs of past or present technology used on other planets.

But what if an alien planet hosted intelligent life that built a technological civilization? Could there be “technosignatures” that civilization on another world would create that could be seen from Earth? And, could these technosignatures be even easier to detect than biosignatures? How can technosignatures help answer the questions: Are aliens real? Do aliens exist?Īdam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, has received a grant from NASA that will enable him to begin to answer these questions. Over the last decade, astronomers have expended great effort trying to find what traces of simple forms of life-known as “biosignatures”-might exist elsewhere in the universe. In order to detect if planets are harboring life, however, scientists must first determine what features indicate that life is (or once was) present. These planets may be the key to answering the questions, are aliens real, and do aliens exist?

Since that finding-which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics-researchers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, including some Earth-like planets that may have the potential to harbor life. In 1995 a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Are aliens real? Do aliens exist? A NASA grant enables Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank to search for traces of advanced technology on exoplanets.

Recent alien news