In 1995, a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics—researchers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, including some Earth-like planets that have the potential to harbor life. These are worlds in the "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist and may be the key to answering questions about whether life exists beyond Earth.
In order to detect if planets are harboring life, however, scientists must first determine what features indicate that life is (or once was) present.
Over the last decade, astronomers have expended great effort trying to find what traces of simple forms of life—known as "biosignatures"—might exist elsewhere in the universe. But what if an alien planet hosted intelligent life that built a technological civilization? Could there be "technosignatures" that civilization on another world would create that could be seen from Earth? And, could these technosignatures be even easier to detect than biosignatures?
Adam Frank—along with collaborators including Jason Wright from Pennsylvania State University, Manasvi Lingam from Florida Institute of Technology, and Ravi Kopparapu from the Goddard Space Flight Center—produced the first entries in an online technosignature library, a tool that future astronomers can use when scanning promising exoplanets for alien technology.
"SETI has always faced the challenge of figuring out where to look," Frank says. "Which stars do you point your telescope at and look for signals? Now we know where to look. We have thousands of exoplanets including planets in the habitable zone where life can form. The game has changed."
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