Scientists look for alien technology in strange perfectly synchronised solar system

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Scientists are looking for evidence of alien technology in a faraway solar system with the most perfect mathematical alignment and synchrony of planets ever seen.

The solar system, about 100 light years away from ours, has six planets orbiting an orange dwarf star called HD 110067.

Each of the planets, researchers say, orbits in harmony with its adjacent ones in extremely rare perfect synchrony, suggesting they likely remain undisturbed since their formation a billion years ago.

The six planets, scientists found, move similar to a perfectly synchronized symphony known as resonance that is “precise” and “very orderly”.

“Amongst the over 5000 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars than our Sun, resonances are not rare, nor are systems with several planets. What is extremely rare though, is to find systems where the resonances span such a long chain of six planets,” Hugh Osborn from the University of Bern, who was part of the team that found this planet system, said.

Astronomers are looking for radio signals from these planets, smaller than the size of Neptune, that may likely point to evidence for past or present alien technology, or technosignatures.

The idea of searching for “technosignatures” on other worlds has been considered by astronomers for more than half a century.

On Earth, for instance, one of the strongest such signs of technology is the emission from nightside city lights.

But finding signs of alien civilisations using such signatures is difficult mainly since the Milky Way galaxy is very big.

Researchers can study the spectrum of radio emissions that are produced from Earth-based technology and extrapolate this to what an alien world may produce.

While looking for signs of technology in other worlds, researchers generally focus on radio transmissions such as the famous “Wow!” signal.

In the latest study, scientists covered frequencies from 1 to 11.2 giga hertz using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, US.

Researchers did not find any technosignatures in the current study, but say this “unusual” solar system remains an interesting target for future search for the signs of alien life as some of these worlds are likely to have liquid water.

“While we find no signals with this search, we anticipate returning to this system and others like it in the future with increasingly sensitive and diverse search methods,” they wrote in the study.