As scientists devise new ways to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the newest may be to sift through star clusters.
According to Mashable, the Milky Way alone has some 150 collections of about a million stars in a 100-light-year-wide space, also known as globular clusters. Many of the stars in these clusters are red dwarfs like the sun, so they are more likely to have been around for some time.
Presented at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the findings contradict a long held theory that globular clusters are poor environments for planets. Still, there has only been one planet ever found in a globular cluster, Discovery News reported.
"If they house planets, globular clusters provide ideal environments for advanced civilizations that can survive over long times," Rosanne Di Stefano, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in a summary of the paper detailing the findings. "If planets are found and if our arguments are correct, searches for intelligent life are most likely to succeed when directed toward globular clusters."
The researchers noted that this will not help expedite the search for alien civilizations, but does lay out a new area for research.
"We call it the 'globular cluster opportunity,'" Di Stefano said in a statement. "Sending a broadcast between the stars wouldn't take any longer than a letter from the U.S. to Europe in the 18th century."
"Interstellar travel would take less time too.
"The Voyager probes are 100 billion miles from Earth, or one-tenth as far as it would take to reach the closest star if we lived in a globular cluster. That means sending an interstellar probe is something a civilization at our technological level could do in a globular cluster."
