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One of the world’s largest telescopes has just joined the hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the cosmos.
Since 2016, the Breakthrough Listen project has been quietly using radio telescopes to listen for unusual radio signals, or technosignatures, from potentially advanced alien civilizations within the Milky Way. The project, launched in part by the late Stephen Hawking and funded by Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner, already uses the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia in the United States and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, as well as other radio telescopes from around the world to scan nearby stars. But now the MeerKAT telescope — an array of 64 separate dishes in South Africa and currently the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere — has joined the party.
After more than two years of integrating their programs into the MeerKAT system, Breakthrough Listen scientists have finally started using data collected by the array of dishes to search for unusual signals from nearby stars, according to a pronunciation (opens in new tab) released on December 1.
The inclusion of MeerKAT will “expand the number of targets sought by a factor of 1,000,” Breakthrough Listen representatives wrote in the statement. This will greatly increase the chances of detecting a technosignature, if there are any, she added.
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MeerKAT dramatically improves the number of targets that Breakthrough Listen can analyze because the dishes can focus on up to 64 different targets at a time, while other telescopes can only focus on one at a time.
“MeerKAT can see a portion of the sky 50 times larger than the GBT can see at one time,” Andrew Simion (opens in new tab), principal investigator of Breakthrough Listen and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research center at the University of California Berkeley, said in the statement. “Such a large field of view typically contains many stars that are interesting technosignature targets.”
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Breakthrough Listen can access a continuous stream of data from MeerKAT without disrupting planned astronomical research. Instead, data collected from other studies will be fed into a supercomputer, which uses a special algorithm to scan signals not recognized as coming from known cosmic phenomena such as pulsars, stellar flares or supernovae. When a strange signal is detected, a researcher can then analyze the signal.
Using MeerKAT, Breakthrough Listen will be able to scan more than 1 million stars over the next two years, which is “very exciting”. Cherry Ng (opens in new tab)an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto and a project scientist at Breakthrough Listen, in the statement.
One of the first stars to be examined in more detail by MeerKAT and Breakthrough Listen will be Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, which has two exoplanets lying within the star’s habitable zone, researchers said.
In June, Chinese astronomers, using the massive “Sky Eye” telescope in Guizhou, China – the largest radio telescope on Earth – announced that they detected a possible alien signal. But this was fast debunked by one of the study’s authors revealing the signal was almost certainly human radio interference.
