Man's search for extra-terrestrial life hasn't been particularly fruitful, so far, but a team from Uppsala University believes it may be able to find signs of other beings by searching for "vanishing" stars.
By searching the sky, the team hope to see if any of the 300,000 light sources they've surveyed have disappeared in between surveys.
"Searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) using large survey data often look for possible signatures of astroengineering," explained the researchers. "We propose to search for physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology, by carrying out a search for disappearing galaxies and Milky Way stars."
As part of their research they selected 10 million objects and searched for objects not found at the expected positions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). They did this by visually examining images of 290,000 objects with no counterpart in the SDSS.
From this, the team found one star that had seemingly disappeared. In particular, they found one candidate of interest for follow-up photometry, although they added "it is very uncertain."
The object can be seen clearly in one image, and despite being still visible in another, it is "very faint," suggesting its brightness has dimmed considerably.
Examples of such "hypothetical effects", the team said, include a galaxy that "rapidly and strongly changes size over the course of a few years", a galaxy that "disappears entirely from its location", or stars that disappear from their location.
Though this disappearance could be down to alien lifeforms, there could also astrophysical reasons – quasars, for example, often dim. But the team remains hopeful.
"This opens up for fascinating, new interpretations of our ever-changing sky," they said.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
