The work, which has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could potentially open up vast new areas of the universe for exploration by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations) scientists. Thus, the authors hope that our chances of finding “strong transmitters” in deep space will increase, proving that we are not alone here.

I think over time we realized that when we make SETI observations with a radio telescope, we are sensitive not only to the target star in the center of the field, but also to a Moon-sized region of the sky. Other objects in this area include foreground stars and background stars in our own Milky Way. Until recently we didn’t know how to use this fact because we didn’t know the distance to these stars,
said study co-author Michael Garrett.

Using the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, Garrett and his colleague Andrew Simion, director of the SETI Research Center at Berkeley and principal investigator of the Breakthrough Listen program, were able to obtain much more precise measurements.

How to look for traces of extraterrestrial life in ancient data?

Based on new precise measurements, scientists have analyzed more than 400 previous studies of our galaxy as part of the Breakthrough Initiative and will discover more than 140,000 objects once not seen in images from various telescopes. Among these “astrophysical exotics”, according to the press release, were:

• galactic nuclei,
• radio galaxies,
• interactive galaxies,
• and a galaxy whose gravity forms a gravitational lens.

New objects in photography based on old data / Photo University of Manchester

So, no matter where the scientists point their telescopes, an interesting space object will be displayed. And now, when we know how to identify this exotic, which was previously hidden from our eyes, the chances of humanity encountering an extraterrestrial signal increase significantly.