Researchers searching for life beyond Earth spend a lot of time thinking about what telltale signs might be detectable astronomically. Forms of unambiguous evidence for the presence of life on another world are known as biosignatures. By extension, techno signatures are indicators of activity by intelligent, civilisation-building life.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, focuses on picking up signals that could be alien communication, but other approaches include observing traces of industrial air pollution on an exoplanet; observing the emission of artificial light from cities on the planet's night side; or even detecting evidence that a highly capable civilisation has constructed a shell around its star, known as a Dyson sphere, to capture its emitted energy.
This story is from the August 2024 edition of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
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This story is from the August 2024 edition of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
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