[E370]Space "Treasure Map" Guides E.T. Search

Space "Treasure Map" Guides E.T. Search

By Christopher Intagliata on March 3, 2016

Carl Sagan[1] once referred to our home planet as [CLIP: "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam[2]."] And that poetic description[3] holds true[4] for a lot of exoplanets[地外行星], too. In fact one of the simplest ways we detect exoplanets is by looking at their sunbeam… and measuring how it dims[变模糊,变暗淡], ever so slightly, as the exoplanet passes across it, called a transit[5]. 

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小行星2709、火星上的一个撞击坑以他的名字命名。——百度百科

[2]我们身在宇宙之中，就像是漂浮在尘埃中的一颗微粒。(而我相信，人类的未来会是如何，端视我们对宇宙的了解有多么透彻而定。)——Carl Sagan

[3]诗意般的描述

[4]适用；有效

[5]transit—凌日较小天体在较大天体前经过的过程；另外也指天体上中天，即经过观测者当地天子午线的过程。

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Which raises an interesting question: "Thinking about extraterrestrial[地球外的] observers—which of them would observe the Earth, moving across our own sun?" Ralph Pudritz, a theoretical astrophysicist[1] at McMaster University[2] in Canada. He and his colleague René Heller quantified[测量;量化;定量] the narrow band[3] of space from which any observers on other worlds would be able to see the Earth transiting the sun. 

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And they determined that this line of sight[1] would be a plane just half a degree thick, but that cuts through a slice of our galaxy that's estimated to contain 100,000 sunlike stars… along with their companion planets. The analysis is in the journal Astrobiology[2]. [René Heller and Ralph E. Pudritz,(online soon)]

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Pudritz and Heller suggest that hunters of extraterrestrial life may want to listen particularly closely for signals originating at star systems[1] within that narrow band of galactic[银河的] sky. Advanced civilizations there may have already detected us using the transit method, they say, and may now be sending us a message. You might think of this paper, then, like a treasure map[2], for intelligent life. "We don't know if there's treasure out there of course, right? You never know that about a treasure map. But it's a good place to look.”

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—Christopher Intagliata

From 60-Second Science