The search for intelligent life in the universe is getting a major boost from the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, which is the most comprehensive attempt ever to detect alien communications and technologies. Funded by billionaire Yuri Milner, the initiative is currently scanning one million stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way, for signs of alien civilizations. Now, a pair of scientists have demonstrated that this huge ongoing survey might serendipitously capture signs of aliens in even more remote locations, such as galaxies that appear in the background of images that are focused on stars in the Milky Way.  These extragalactic objects are not the main targets of Breakthrough Listen, but they could help constrain “the prevalence of very powerful extraterrestrial transmitters,” according to a new study posted on the preprint server arxiv that is co-authored by Michael Garrett, who is the Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester and the director of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics… (READ MORE)

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