The extra terrestrial could hear transmissions send via NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) to the deep space spacecraft.
In a recent study submitted to the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Where a pair of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley examine the possibility that extra terrestrial intelligence in deep space intercepting transmission signals send to outer spacecraft via NASA’s Deep Space Network station.
The five deep spacecraft are Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 11 & 10, and New Horizons which are receiving signals from Earth’s Deep Space Network (DSN). These signals travel deep into space and it is possible that extra terrestrial intelligence encounters these signals.
The spacecraft Voyager-I and Voyager-II completed their mission many years ago. Voyager-I completed left our solar system in 2012 and Voyager-II in 2018 and both are traveling in interstellar space. The other three have yet to cross our solar system Heliopause ( it is the mid area between the solar wind and interstellar wind).
What Studies Led Scientists to Believe that Extra Terrestrial Intercept Our Transmission?
Reilly Derrick, who is a first-year Aerospace engineering undergraduate student at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering said in recent studies were inspired by a 2019 paper examining that four out of five spacecraft will pass within the next few million years.
He told that “This work [2019 study] identifies the stars that interstellar spacecraft will closely encounter on their paths through the universe“Our paper expands upon this idea by identifying which stars the terrestrial transmissions to interstellar spacecraft will encounter. These transmissions cover a wider volume of the surrounding universe, meaning they will encounter more stars. Additionally, the transmissions from Earth travel much faster than the spacecraft themselves, so we would expect potential intelligent life to notice and return transmissions much sooner.”
Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 are located outside the heliosphere
For the study, both researchers use a combination of trans-mission beamwidth between the DSN and the five spacecraft, spacecraft telemetry data from the JPL Horizon system, and data from the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars (GCNS) to calculate which stars will intercept the outward DSN transmission from the earth.
The GCNS include 331,312 stars within 100 parsecs of Earth, with one parsec equal to 3.26 light years.
The researchers identified the number of times the stars encounter the transmission send to each spacecraft in ascending order:
- The transmission sends to New Horizons encounter by 142 stars
- The transmission sent to Pioneer 10 encounter by 241 stars
- The transmission sent to Voyager 1 encountered by 289 stars
- The transmission sent to Voyager 2 encountered by 325 stars
- The transmission sent to Pioneer 11 encounter by 411
When Will We Heard Back Signals From the ExtraTerrestrial Life Being
Scientists Derrick could expect 5 stars for which we could expect returned transmission within the 21st century and for the total 7 stars we could expect the return signals within the next 100 years. He said, “Although this is obviously a very small number compared to all the stars in the surrounding universe, the fact that there is even a small chance intelligent life surrounding these stars could recognize human transmissions and communicate back to us within our lifetimes is very exciting.”
The 5 stars Derrick heard reply within 50 light-years away and the other two we heard are located 73 light years away from Earth.
Both researchers believed that we are not alone in the universe. And the narrow number of stars provides the opportunity for further researchers to search for extra terrestrial life.
Dr. Issacson said “Indeed, the pursuit of these types of questions, including our recent discovery that one of five stars like the Sun has a planet like the Earth, has only been possible to answer with modern technology,” We now have the capability of detecting technology from a distant civilization and that is really profound. This study is a contribution to that pursuit. It has not been that long in history, only ~400 years, since Giordano Bruno suggested that other worlds like the Earth may orbit other stars. That claim did not go well for him. Now we have scientific evidence of such worlds, and we are pursuing the next great discovery: Intelligent life beyond the Earth.”
Now scientists are waiting for extraterrestrial life to respond to our signals, they are not completely sure but time will tell everything whether there is extra terrestrial life or not.