Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News for Students
Scientists have been searching for signals of aliens for 60 years.
So far, they’ve had no luck in finding any. So you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Where is everyone?”In fact, the lack of success may just reflect not looking widely enough.
A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching a volume the size of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans. That’s according to Jason Wright and his colleagues. Wright is an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. His team presented its calculations in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org.
“If you looked at a random hot tub’s worth of water in the ocean, you wouldn’t always expect a fish,” Wright says.
Still, that’s far more space searched than had been calculated back in 2010. That estimate had been done for the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial…
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