by Lauren Tousignant May 10, 2018 (nypost.com)
• On May 7th, NASA’s $100M ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project announced that an enhancement to its CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia will allow it to scan millions of stars across the Milky Way over the next 60 days. The telescope will allow scientists to quickly scan the entire sky rather than one single point of the sky at a time.
• “With these new capabilities, we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail,” said Danny Price, at Breakthrough Listen. “By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”
• Also, a new bill in the US House of Representatives proposes $10 million a year to NASA to search for signs of extraterrestrial life, searching for technosignatures such as radio transmissions in order to “meet the NASA objective to search for life’s origin, evolution, distribution and future in the universe,” according to the bill. If fully passed, it would mark the first time since 1992 that NASA has received federal funding for the search for extraterrestrial life, and reinstate SETI into the NASA budget.
The search for extraterrestrial life is getting extra.
NASA and a project called Breakthrough Listen are both making moves to help boost the chances of finding aliens.
On May 7, Breakthrough Listen announced updates to the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, that will allow it to scan millions of stars across the Milky Way over the next 60 days.
The $100 million Breakthrough Listen project was founded by a group of scientists, including late physicist Stephen Hawking, in 2016 based on the notion that we should be listening for signs of extraterrestrials — not just looking.
Breakthrough’s previous effort with Parkes only scanned one single point of the sky at a time, with a focus on stars near the sun. But the telescope’s latest updates allow scientists to scan the entire sky at 130 gigabits per second — which is thousands of times the bandwidth of your laptop’s internet connection on its best day.
“With these new capabilities, we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail,” Danny Price, a research fellow at Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. “By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”
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