7 articles
Tabby's Star spent a decade as the most famous 'alien megastructure' candidate in astronomy. A July 2026 study spotted a single symmetric transit in TESS data that fits a giant planet on a three-year orbit. It is suggestive, not confirmed.
A Soviet astrophysicist sorted civilizations into three tiers by the energy they command - a planet, a star, a whole galaxy. It doubles as a search strategy, and when astronomers flagged seven stars as possible Type II megastructures, the trail led somewhere ordinary.
The frequencies of hydrogen and hydroxyl bracket a naturally quiet stretch of the radio sky. Because the two combine to make water, SETI's founders reasoned any curious civilization might gather there - and most searches still listen near it.
Biosignatures look for the chemical exhaust of living things in far-off atmospheres. Technosignatures listen for radio hums and laser pulses from technology. They are the two roads to alien life - and each has its own way of fooling us.
For at least one full 33-day orbit, the VLA and MeerKAT swept the famous exoplanet across radio frequencies sensitive enough to catch a trillion-watt beacon. A SETI team found no artificial signal - though they are careful about what that silence proves.
For the first time, astronomers had advance warning an interstellar visitor was approaching - and used it to scan 3I/ATLAS for alien tech. The Allen Telescope Array sifted 74 million signal candidates and found nothing artificial aboard.
A new arXiv preprint by Breakthrough Listen researcher Brian Lacki argues that Moon dust could harbor microscopic relics of extinct extraterrestrial megastructures scattered across the galaxy over billions of years.
