Two scientists working with the alien-hunting Listen Initiative announced Wednesday that they have developed a new technique to search old data.
The research could potentially open up huge new swathes of the universe to scrutiny by SETI scientists, thus increasing our chances of spotting "powerful transmitters" in distant space.
When we use a radio telescope to look for SETI, we are sensitive to not only the target star in the center of the field, but a patch of sky about the size of the Moon.
There are foreground and background stars in our own Milky Way. We didn't know how to use this fact because we didn't know how far away the stars were.
With the help of the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope, Garret and Andrew were able to get much more accurate data. Over the course of more than 400 previous surveys, the pair were able to uncover more than 140,000 objects that were previously hidden. According to the press release, there were a number of astrophysical exotica.
"It turns out that wherever you point your telescope, the field of view is going to include some interesting cosmic object," Garrett said in the Vice interview.
It makes you wonder how much we might've overlooked now that we know how to identify these once buried exotica.
The Swiss government scientist says we may be on the edge of discovering alien life.
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