We are searching for exoplanets in the nearby Universe and we seem to be quite successful at it. New research shows that alien civilizations could use the transitive method to find us, but only if they come from a total of 1004 stellar systems which can be found up to a distance of 300 light-years away from us.
Image by Guillaume Preat from Pixabay
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We are finding one exoplanet after another. So far, we have confirmed the existence of over 4,000 of them. Some are similar to the planets of our Solar system and some are crazily different. The majority of the exoplanets we have found were found using the transitive method – by searching for tiny changes in the brightness of a particular star. These changes are caused by a planet passing over it.
Lisa Kaltenegger from the Carl Sagan Institute and Joshua Pepper from the Lehigh University asked a simple question – If we see them, can they see us? What they meant exactly is how many stellar systems are nearby that could detect us by the transitive method.
They focused on main sequence stars – stars that aren’t that extreme. Their effort led them to 1004 such stars which can be found at a maximum distance of 300 light-years away from us. That’s a good number, even though it is just a fraction of the total number of stars in our part of the Universe.
If an alien civilization would detect our planet using the transitive method, they could not only detect our planet's existence but they could also notice that its chemical makeup is somewhat strange. This is because the transitive method is the best we got so far for trying to find an exoplanet with life on it.
So, how exactly did the researchers pick the stars? The key was how our Solar system is oriented. They considered primarily the ecliptic plane which is the plane at which the planets orbit around the Sun. And if an opportune observer is on the same plane he has a chance to see the Sun dim a little bit when the Earth passes over it.
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