![]() They determined that LIGO is capable of detecting a RAMAcraft around the mass of Jupiter (that's 317.8 Earth masses, so we can rule out making one any time soon), with a warp drive that could accelerate to 10 percent of the speed of light. Led by physicist Luke Sellers of the University of California Los Angeles, the researchers set about calculating the size and speed of an alien spacecraft that would be detectable by LIGO – what they named a Rapid And/or Massive Accelerating spacecraft (RAMAcraft). So if an alien civilization did have technology capable of producing gravitational waves we could detect, it would have to be pretty freaking impressive. But the gravitational waves produced by something as powerful as a large rocket would still be too small for our current detection capabilities. When these stellar corpses merge, the inspiral and collision send out ripples in the very fabric of space-time – a bit like the way a rock dropped in a pond generates tiny waves, except in all directions and at the speed of light.Īctually, any object with mass that accelerates produces gravitational waves. They're generated by massive events here on Earth, the gravitational waves we've detected have been produced by collisions between massive compact objects, black holes, and neutron stars. Gravitational waves are pretty much the only tool we have to probe the cosmos that doesn't rely on light. So if there was an intelligent alien civilization out there with technology that could generate powerful gravitational waves, well, maybe we could detect it. They don't attenuate in the same way electromagnetic signals do, and can be detected across larger distances. The kinds of electromagnetic waves we use to communicate weakens, or attenuates, as it spreads, making it all but impossible to sift out of the noise beyond a couple hundred light years.īut gravitational wave signals are different. ![]() But our ability to search for recognizable technology is limited to just a few tens of thousands of stars. Whether Earth is alone in the Universe in hosting intelligent life (or even life at all) is one of the biggest open questions deviling humanity. It can currently be found on preprint server arXiv. The paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, will be submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This, the researchers say, would extend the search for extraterrestrial intelligence beyond Earth's closest neighbors to all the stars in the galaxy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |