Can This Australian Telescope Help Find Aliens?

First Posted: Nov 10, 2016 05:35 AM EST
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The Breakthrough Listen project, which is the "largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth," has recently employed the Parkes radio telescope in Australia for its alien search mission.

The Australian telescope becomes the third to be used in the project, after West Virginia's Green Bank Telescope and California's Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory. In addition, the representatives from Breakthrough have also recently announced that they would be enlisting China's new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which is the largest radio telescope in the world, for coordinating SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) observations.

Parkes telescope is a 210-foot wide dish in New South Wales that is worked by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia. Interestingly, the telescope has previously helped in relaying live video of the Apollo 11 landing back to Earth in July 1969.

"The addition of Parkes is an important milestone," said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives. "These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilizations." The project used the Parkes dish on Monday to observe the Proxima Centauri star system, to detect alien signals.

Incidentally, the Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the Sun and is located around 4.2 lightyears away. In August this year, astronomers announced that they had detected an Earth-like planet called Proxima b that orbits our neighboring star. Furthermore, scientists have also suggested that the planet could have a habitable zone and may be capable of hosting life. At the moment, all the suggestions are only in theory as per reports; however, by enlisting the Parkes telescope, the Breakthrough Listen project has taken a step forward to find evidence.

The Breakthrough Listen project was announced in July 2015, and its founders include noted physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner. The $100 million initiative aims to detect SETI signals by observing 1 million stars that are closest to the Sun, apart from eavesdropping on the 100 closest galaxies to the Milky Way.

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