Nobody's Fool: Aliens May Be Using Lasers to Conceal Their Whereabouts

Astronomers believe that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations could have the ability to cloak their presence or intentionally broadcast it with the help of controlled laser emissions, according to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

By using controlled laser emissions, intelligent species from beyond the solar system could conceal their presence or deliberately broadcast it, a team of astronomers was quoted by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society as saying.

The astronomers recalled that currently, the transit method is "the most successful planet discovery and characterization tool at our disposal."

"Accordingly, we propose that a civilization may deliberately broadcast their technological capabilities by distorting their transit to an artificial shape, which serves as both a SETI beacon and a medium for data transmission," they said.

SETI is a common abbreviation for a field of science related to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Humanity is able to camouflage the Earth from Kepler-like broadband surveys through "a laser array emitting a peak power of about 30 MW for roughly 10 hours per year," according to the astronomers.

"Alternatively, a civilization could cloak only the atmospheric signatures associated with biological activity on their world, such as oxygen, which is achievable with a peak laser power of just around 160 kW per transit," they pointed out.

Although the orbital telescope Kepler, the HARPS instrument and a number of other devices have discovered thousands of exoplanets in the past few years, no signs of life have been found yet.

However, speculation is still rife about the possible existence of aliens, especially after last year's discovery of unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, something that scientists said cannot be explained by natural processes.