Scientists Are Searching For Alien Signals From The Heart Of Milky Way Galaxy: The Galactic Center

Galactic Center

Galactic Center is the rotational center of our own Milky Way galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which powers the compact radio source Sagittarius A. It is approx. 26,000 light years away from Earth.

Lets suppose we're an advanced civilization with advanced technology looking to communicate with other civilizations throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Where would we be setting up our beacon? Probably close to home, right.

Yes, scientists have been conducting extensive searches for alien signals from various regions of the Milky Way, including the central region. The center of the Milky Way, known as the galactic center / bulge, is an area of interest because it offers a rich target for SETI efforts due to its abundance of stars, potential for planetary systems, and the possibility of highly advanced civilizations residing there.

credit: google images

One prominent project in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the Breakthrough Listen initiative, which is a comprehensive scientific program dedicated to actively searching for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Breakthrough Listen uses advanced telescopes and signal processing techniques to survey millions of stars in the Milky Way, including the galactic center, in the hope of detecting artificial signals or anomalies that could indicate the presence of an alien civilization.

According to a team of scientists led by Akshay Suresh ofCornell University, an astronomer, who have devised a way to look for these signals.

The BLIPSS (Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals) project is designed to seek and amplify strangely pulsed radio emission from the galactic center that may be messages from extraterrestrial intelligences.

"BLIPSS showcases the cutting-edge potential of software as a science multiplier for SETI," Suresh explains

The galactic center is a very hectic place, filled with all sorts of stars, and thick clouds of dust and gas that obscure much of whatever is in there. In addition, there are natural objects that do send out repeating radio signals.

Credit: google images

However, it's also very cluttered, compared to other regions of the sky; statistically, given the large number of stars in the galactic center line-of-sight, it offers the greatest potential for being the direction in which a habitable exoplanet lies.

If we're going to find an alien signal, that's one of the best places to look, but it's not without its challenges. Teasing out an artificial signal from the natural cacophony of light emanating from the galactic center is quite a monumental task.

Periodic pulsed beacons would be an inexpensive way of transmitting signals across vast tracts of interstellar space. Here on Earth, we use pulsed signals for applications such as remote radar sensing and aircraft navigation, but scaled up by sufficiently advanced technology, they could be sent much farther.

BLIPSS uses what is known as a fast folding algorithm, which is a highly sensitive search technique for identifying periodic signals. In the past, for example, scientists have used it to search for a type of star called a pulsar, which emits periodic pulses of light.