New study looks for signs of aliens in space

It's a question that many people want to know the answer to - are there aliens out in space?

Astronomers in Australia have been doing some research to see if they could find any signs of alien technology.

So what did their work involve and - more importantly - what did they find out?!

Astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia to search for signs of intelligent life in space

What was the study?

It was a large-scale study of over 10 million stars and involved searching for evidence of alien technology in space.

The research was carried out by two astronomers - Dr Chenoa Tremblay and Professor Steven Tingay - and their findings have now been published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

They used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) - radio telescopes planted in the soil - to search for powerful radio signals.

The WMA meant they could "explore hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life".

If they found anything, that could have been a "sign of intelligent life".

They concentrated on a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation - lots of stars have exploded there and died, which creates ideal conditions for new stars to form.

Do you think there are aliens in space?

What did they find out?

After listening to the Vela constellation for 17 hours, they found NO evidence of alien technologies.

But that doesn't necessarily mean aliens don't exist - they might just be a bit elusive in that part of space!

Prof Tingay said he wasn't shocked that they didn't find anything though.

He said: "Even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth's oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool."

He added: "Since we can't really assume how possible alien civilisations might utilise technology, we need to search in many different ways."