Aliens may have received messages from Earth – but will reply 27 years later
Aliens may have received one of Earth's is anybody out there' messages – but it will take them 27 years to reply, boffins say.
Space is so vast it takes light years to swap communications – slowing man's hunt for extraterrestrial life to a crawl.
NASA's Deep Space Network – aka DSN – is a global array of radio dishes which has fired off radio signals to far flung parts of the Solar System in a bid to trigger a response from intelligent alien life.
READ MORE: Alien life 'more likely to be Terminator-style robots than ET', scientists warn
According to scientists' calculations a signal sent to the Pioneer 10 space probe – launched in 1972 and currently 12 billion miles from Earth – reached a dead star known as white dwarf 27 light years away in 2002.
But experts estimate a return message from any alien life near that dead star would not reach Earth until at least 2029.
Signals were sent to Voyager 2 – launched in 1977 and now also more than 12 billion miles away – in 1980 and 1983 and reached two remote stars in 2007.
But boffins do not expect any alien replies from them until at least the early 2030s.
Researchers have created a list of stars that will encounter Earth’s signals within the next century in a new study published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
But due to the snail's pace of space communications the Earth should not hold its breath waiting for responses. Critics warn even if ET sends a reply scientists may miss it.
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US astronomer Macy Huston, who was not involved in the study, said: "If a response were to be sent our ability to detect it would depend on many factors – how long or often we monitor the star for a response and how long or often the return signal is transmitted.''
Radio astronomer Jean-Luc Margot, of the University of California, US, said: "Our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials.''
He said Earth's radio transmissions had only reachedone-millionth of the volume of the Milky Way'.
"The probability that another civilisation resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilisations in the Milky Way,'' he added.
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