Astronomers always thought that extraterrestrial beings could have a mysterious way of “waving” at us from very far away. They could hold the key for unlocking many conundrums of the Cosmos. Would they be willing to teach us? Would they share any eventual technological advancements with us? Would they be friends or foes?
We’ll probably find out one day if aliens truly are there, somewhere. And the chances are pretty huge that they exist. Astronomers had always been hoping that radio waves reaching our planet represent a clue that someone out there in the incomprehensible vastness of the Cosmos is trying to say “Hello!”.
Taking a deeper look at the Large Magellanic Cloud
An international team of scientists led by Clara M. Pennock, Ph.D. student at Keele University, had photographed the Large Magellanic Cloud at radio wavelengths. They further studied the stellar structures, and there’s a lot of options here. The Large Magellanic Cloud contains tens of millions of stars, and it acts as an orbiting galaxy of the Milky Way.
The research team also studied newly found radio emissions from distant galaxies and from stars belonging to our own Milky Way galaxy.
Lead author Clara Pennock declared, as quoted by Phys.org:
The sharp and sensitive new image reveals thousands of radio sources we’ve never seen before. Most of these are actually galaxies millions or even billions of light years beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud. We typically see them because of the supermassive black holes in their centers which can be detected at all wavelengths, especially radio. But we now also start finding many galaxies in which stars are forming at a tremendous rate. Combining this data with previous observations from X-ray, optical and infrared telescopes will allow us to explore these galaxies in extraordinary detail.
The most probable variant is that the newfound radio waves aren’t proof of an alien civilization trying to reach us. However, studying these phenomenons remains a great idea.
The new study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
