THE hunt for alien life has been given a massive boost after a global initiative announced plans to scan one million stars for extraterrestrial signals
 |
| ALIEN HUNT: Stephen Hawking's Breakthrough Listen project will scan one million stars for ET |
Breakthrough Listen, founded by billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, will use the powerful MeerKAT radio-telescope in South Africa to search the stars for signs of intelligent life.
This huge project significantly extends the size of Breakthrough Listen which currently uses the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA, and Parkes Observatory in Australia.
Breakthrough Listen will examine 1,000 times the number of targets as it had done previously in an area described as the "quietest part of the radio spectrum".
Galaxy scanning technology will be listening in for signs of 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Collaborating with MeerKAT will significantly enhance the capabilities of Breakthrough Listen”, said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives.
“This is now a truly global project.”
MeerKAT is a massive array of 64 radio antennas in the remote Karoo Desert of South Africa.
The scientists and astronomers are looking out for technosignatures, signals which indicate the presence of technology.
The Breakthrough Listen system on MeerKAT will have an input data rate of 4 terabits per second (4000 gigabits per second), which is about 40 thousand times faster than a typical home internet connection.
The MeerKAT telescope has already been used to survey distant galaxies, study supernova exploding stars and for mapping the distribution of hydrogen gas in the early universe.
UK astrophysics professor Michael Garrett, who works on Breakthrough Listen, said: "This development represents a step-change for SETI research.
"Employing a large distributed array of hugely sensitive radio telescopes like MeerKAT is really a no-brainer, offering many advantages over large single dish surveys.
"The Breakthrough Listen MeerKAT project can be a powerful new tool for SETI with the potential to completely transform the field."
Since 2015 Breakthrough Listen has already had several successes.
Astronomers detected 15 powerful, radio signals from a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away, dubbed FRB 121102.
Intriguingly, the signals had been observed previously but this time they were at a higher frequency.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment