Featured Image Credit: Nina Franova/Stringer / Apostoli Rossella / Getty Images
People have been talking about close encounters with aliens for years.
From wild stories of being taken and experimented on by curious extraterrestrials to claims of witnessing UFO crashes, there’s no shortage of unbelievable tales across the internet.
But one astronaut believes they're out there - and she perhaps holds more creditability than most.
Katherine Bennell-Pegg, who is best known for being Australia's first-ever female astronaut spoke at Sydney’s South by Southwest conference and didn’t shy away from the big question: Do aliens exist?
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The 39-year-old mum currently sits as Director of Space Technology with the Australian Space Agency (ASA) and addressed the undying question.
"There are definitely aliens out there," she responded. "I don’t think they walk among us, even if it feels like that sometimes."
But the biggest challenge that remains is finding them, she said.
Considering the size of the universe and the technology we have to hand, it could prove harder than most people think.
Bennell-Pegg explained: "Given the scale of the universe, we think there are somewhere between 100 to 200 sextillion stars in the universe.
"That is similar to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.
"All the ingredients for life, the molecules and elements we need, are the most abundant in the universe."
Bennell-Pegg went on to say that we’re just starting to explore planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. "We’ve found almost 6,000 exoplanets, that is planets around other stars," she said:
"Many of them are in what could be a habitable zone. I just think, odds are, life is out there. The interesting thing is though, if it is, will we ever be able to communicate with them? Who knows."
The astronaut expressed her interest in keeping the search 'closer to home' to 'find evidence of life on other planets within our own solar system,' she explained.
“We’re looking for it on Mars and we are about to be looking for it on the moons of Jupiter, which is thought to have liquid water beneath the icy crusts.
“Europa clipper, which is a mission just launched, will be looking for that."
This backs US space agency NASA who claimed back in October that there could be a chance of finding minute alien life under the Red Planet's surface.
She concluded: “More practically, this study in astrobiology, which is life off earth, teaches us about how life can evolve to be more resilient to life on earth as well.”
