Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2022

MAY-JUNE 2022 chances because we haven’t discov- ered another technological civiliza- tion yet. In the search for extrater- restrial intelligence, it makes sense to cast our net wide. The galactic center is a prime SETI target, as the line of sight has the largest inte- grated count of galactic stars than any other direction.” This point of view is rather question- able, both because there are much more specific targets than a con- geries of stars in which to look for technosignatures, and because a “wide net” does not appear more reasonable than any other option. Precisely because no alien signal has T aken with the HAWK-I instru- ment on ESO’s Very Large Tele- scope (VLT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert, this extraordinary image shows the central region of the Milky Way at an angular resolution of 0.2 arc seconds. It is towards this area, densely populated with stars, that a team of researchers pointed the Murchison Widefield Array in an attempt to record alien signals. Nes- tled in the center of the image is Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s super- massive black hole, whose presence conditioned every aspect of the evo- lution of our galaxy from the very beginning. [ESO/Nogueras-Lara et al.] As happened for previous similar re- search coordinated by Tremblay, the instrument used was the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), this time tuned to a frequency of 155 MHz, far enough away from commercial radio frequencies to avoid most of the interference of local origin. As stated by the authors of the re- search, the choice of the galactic center as a target was dictated solely by the fact that the stellar density is greater in that direction than in any other direction and, ap- parently, the chances of success are higher: “We don’t know where to look or not look to improve our