Alien life search: Intelligent ET evidence could be ‘too alien’ for experts to spot

He said: “Studying the universe largely unshackled from theory is not only a legitimate scientific endeavour – it’s a crucial one.”

Referencing Dr Scott Gaudi of NASA’s Advisory Council, he said: “One thing I am quite sure of, now having spent more than 20 years in this field of exoplanets … expect the unexpected.”

Due to the impossibly infinite number of world in the Universe, the chance of alien species evolving, event at a microbial level, is thought to be extremely high.

To put this into context, a famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field images depicts an approximate 10,000 galaxies in a small region of the night sky.

Each of the galaxies boasts an average of 100 million stars and exoplanet researchers think each star is estimated to have at least one planet.