Ever wondered what an alien astronomer might view when looking at our planet from a star system far-far away? US scientists say they just pictured that in an experiment aimed at improving our search for other pale blue dots.
The search for exoplanets has been going on for years, and one can’t help but think of a possibility that we too are being scanned. To find out what exactly an outside observer would see when pointing the telescopes at Earth in a bit to find if it’s habitable, the team from Cornell University used around 10,000 images of our planet taken by NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, sitting at a gravitational balance point between Earth and the Sun.
They then reduced those images multiple times to simulate what researchers located light years away could see in his telescopes, while looking at our home.
By comparing the zoomed out images to the originals the team was able to single out the parameters that most closely related to land areas, which allowed them to create their model.
Rough silhouettes of Africa, Asia as well as North and South America could be made out in the image they received.
The use of this method by human astronomers won’t allow to achieve a clear image of an alien world, but it could help determine if an exoplanet has oceans and other key conditions required for colonization.
Regrettably, we can’t receive a confirmation on the accuracy of the model from alien scientists (as well as their existence), but some may place hopes in the 2020 US election. In an election promise of truly astronomical scale, Bernie Sanders has recently promised to declassify all data on contacts with UFOs – that is, if he becomes president, of course.