Scientists Crack Cosmic Twinkle to Find Alien Life

Scientists hunting for alien life just got a powerful new tool to separate cosmic signals from Earthly noise.

Researchers at the SETI Institute spent 10 months tracking a pulsar over 3,000 light-years away, watching how its radio signals flickered and shifted as they traveled through space. What they discovered could change how we search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Lead scientist Grayce Brown and her team used the Allen Telescope Array in California to observe pulsar PSR J0332+5434 nearly every day from February through November 2023. They watched the pulsar's signal twinkle like a distant star, caused by clouds of charged gas bending and scattering the radio waves on their journey to Earth.

These tiny distortions delay the pulsar's signal by mere billionths of a second. The delays are so small humans could never perceive them, but they're big enough to matter when you're trying to detect faint gravitational waves or distinguish alien transmissions from human interference.

Why This Inspires

This research solves a critical problem for SETI scientists. When they pick up a mysterious radio signal, they need to know whether it came from across the galaxy or just from someone's garage on Earth.

Now they have a cosmic fingerprint. Any signal genuinely traveling through interstellar space should show the same scintillation pattern the team measured. No twinkle? It's probably just interference from our own planet.

"We need some way to differentiate between signals coming from Earth and signals coming from beyond our Solar System," Brown explained. The research gives scientists exactly that: a reliable test to sort the real cosmic signals from the false alarms.

The findings also help astronomers hunting for gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein. These researchers use pulsars as ultra-precise cosmic clocks, and knowing exactly how interstellar gas delays their signals means more accurate measurements.

Brown's team studied about 20 pulsars over the yearlong campaign and plans to continue observations even longer. Future studies could refine the predictions further, making the cosmic twinkle test even more reliable for spotting genuine messages from the stars.

The search for intelligent life just got a little bit sharper, and our ability to read the universe just got a little bit clearer.