Spot ET's waste heat for chance to find alien life

摘要

Rather than searching for aliens phoning home, scientists are looking for signs of the homes themselves. A new project proposing that galaxy-spanning alien civilisations should generate detectable heat has turned up a few dozen galaxies that hold promise as harbours for life. The best-known technique used to search for tech-sawy aliens is eavesdropping on their communications with each other. But this approach assumes ET is chatty in channels we can hear. The new approach, dubbed G-HAT for Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, makes no assumptions about what alien civilisations may be like.