Scientists simulate how extraterrestrial astronomers will view the Milky Way.

What might extraterrestrial scientists in a faraway galaxy discover if they pointed their telescopes at the Milky Way?

One of the eight planets circling one of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, is all that we care about, all that we comprehend, and all that we can sense. Perhaps an extraterrestrial entity is observing the Milky Way where we are located from a galaxy far, far away. Which will they witness?

That is the same question that scientists posed when they imagined what extraterrestrial astronomers seeing the Milky Way from a great distance would discover if they examined the galaxy's chemical makeup.

Turn the telescope around

To understand how aliens will see our galaxy, it would perhaps be prudent to first understand how we see distant galaxies. Our telescope observations show us a galaxy’s shape and its “spectrum,” which is the sum of the parts that make up the light from the galaxy.

Astronomers on Earth have devised some cunning ways to determine the characteristics of a distant galaxy by studying the scant light that we receive from it. Therefore, we may assume right once that an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization will use equally advanced techniques to observe the Milky Way.