Post by glactus on Mar 6, 2008 21:03:30 GMT
It's one of the biggest questions in all humanity: are we alone in the Universe? Either way, the answer is significant. And so, scientists are searching for intelligence out there. Huge arrays of radio telescopes, like the Allen Array scan the skies for radio broadcasts.
And researchers have also proposed that aliens might be using lasers to communicate with us. A Russian researcher is proposing another way that aliens might be communicating with us - with neutrinos.
To save energy, alien civilizations might not be using radio or optical light at all, they might be communicating in a completely different way, with neutrinos.
Researcher Z. K. Silagadze at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics and Novosibirsk State University recently posted this idea to the Arxiv pre-press mailing list. His article is called SETI and Muon Collider.
Finding neutrinos here on Earth is difficult. It takes a huge vat of water, protected underground from other radiation and a suite of sensitive detectors. And even then, they only turn up a few thousand neutrinos a year.
Neutrino detectors are also sensitive to many different energy levels. They don't have to scan specific frequencies, they can detect high energy neutrinos as easily as low-energy ones.
It has been suggested that advanced civilizations might deliberately choose neutrinos for communications because it shuts out the very young, and not mature civilizations from the galactic conversation.
Give us a few years, and we'll be listening.
In search of alien life
credits
Original Source: Arxiv Filed under: Astrobiology, Physics
This is part text only. See image, full text and all scientists involved at universetoday.com
www.universetoday.com/2008/03/05/do-advanced-civilizations-communicate-with-neutrinos/#more-13052
Article credit: Fraser Cain
