---
title: "New Hope for SETI: Scientists Discover Hidden Millions of Stars in Unexplored Radio Frequencies"
description: "SETI scientists have discovered that millions of stars have already been checked for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, but at the \"wrong\" frequencies. A new study by Louise Mason opens access to unexplored ranges and re-evaluates the scale of our search. 🌌📡🔭"
date: 2026-07-29T05:10:00.000Z
lang: en
url: https://xab.info/en/posts/new-hope-for-seti-scientists-discover-hidden-millions-of-stars-in-unexplored-radio-frequencies
tags: [seti, louise-mason, alma-telescope, astrobiology, radio-astronomy]
publisher: "XAB.info"
---

# New Hope for SETI: Scientists Discover Hidden Millions of Stars in Unexplored Radio Frequencies

![SETI radio telescopes scanning the sky for signals from hidden stars in unexplored frequencies](https://xab.info/media/2026/07/29/seti-novye-radiocastoty-i-milliony-zvezd/seti-novye-radiocastoty-i-milliony-zvezd-1.webp)

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence may receive a powerful boost thanks to a review of observation strategies. Scientists from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project have concluded that signals from alien civilizations could be hiding in radio frequency ranges that have remained largely overlooked for decades.

An analysis of archival data showed that modern telescopes have already covered millions of stars with their beam, of which astronomers were not even aware. This is reported by RBC-Ukraine, citing a study by the SETI Institute published in the journal *Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society*.

### Why were we looking in the wrong place?

For a long time, the search for extraterrestrial signals was conducted in a narrow range of radio frequencies. Scientists considered this area the "ideal place for interstellar calls," as it is here that radiation lines of water molecules are detected. The logic was simple: any advanced civilization must understand the fundamental importance of water and choose these frequencies for communication.

However, a new study proves that high-frequency radio waves could open up a completely different path for searching for technological signals. Astronomer from the University of Manchester, Dr. Louise Mason, conducted the first SETI survey using the ALMA radio telescope system in Chile.

The goal was to detect narrowband radio signals — technosignatures indicating the operation of artificial instruments, rather than natural cosmic processes.

"For decades, SETI searches have focused on a relatively small part of the radio spectrum. We wanted to understand what would happen if we looked somewhere else," noted Louise Mason.

According to the researcher, millimeter and submillimeter radio ranges remain almost completely unexplored for SETI, and this is about opening up a new territory for search.

### The "Stellar Bycatch" Effect

In the course of working with ALMA telescope Band 3 data, no clear signals of extraterrestrial technologies were detected. Nevertheless, the analysis of even four archival observations proved the huge potential of high-frequency telescopes for future research.

The key discovery was the effect of radio astronomy: when a telescope is pointed at one specific target, thousands of other objects simultaneously fall into its field of view. This phenomenon is called "stellar bycatch".

Previously, the number of such hidden stars was estimated using the Gaia catalog. Mason applied a more accurate Besançon Galactic Model (BGM), which takes into account distant, dim, and hard-to-notice stars. The result was stunning: the estimate of the number of stars covered by just one of the preliminary SETI surveys on 1327 observation points increased from 288 thousand to more than 6.1 million.

"One of the most exciting results of this work is the realization that we have surveyed far more stars than was originally thought," emphasized Louise Mason.

Even a very small observation can contain a huge number and variety of stars that we did not plan to study. By combining high-frequency observations with galactic simulations, scientists can better understand what has already been checked and where to look next.

### What's next?

The absence of a detected signal during the first checks does not mean that extraterrestrial life does not exist. It only indicates that there were no technosignatures in the narrow ranges studied.

Astronomers hope that these results will encourage SETI researchers to more actively master high frequencies and more effectively use huge arrays of data that have been stored in observatory archives around the world for years. Perhaps the answer to the question "are we alone in the Universe?" is already written in the archives, but we simply didn't know how to read it.