Participants of the Breakthrough Listen project began searching for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, observing at once the million stars living inside the disk of the Milky Way, according to the press service of the Breakthrough Initiatives Foundation.
“We now have the ability to sift through huge datasets and look for traces of advanced civilizations. We hope that we can prove that our planet is not the only world in the Milky Way with intelligent life,”said Danny Price, project leader at the University of Berkeley (USA).
At the end of July 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and the late British cosmologist Stephen Hawking launched the Breakthrough Listen initiative, under which the businessman will allocate $ 100 million to support the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, which will be built on the basis of SETI developments.
Over the past three years, scientists and engineers at Breakthrough Listen have installed instruments they developed to search for alien life on the American GBT telescope, its Australian cousin at Parks Observatory, and also enlisted the support of the scientific team of the world's largest radio telescope, FAST, built in China two years ago.
A year ago, Breakthrough Listen members spoke about the results of the first attempt to find alien radio signals, in which scientists observed seven hundred stars closest to us. In total, astronomers managed to find about a dozen "suspicious" signals, but all of them, according to the observers themselves, were generated by natural processes in the bowels of stars or in their immediate surroundings.
This failure did not scare away the scientists, and now the project participants have begun a new series of observations, the scale of which this time has been expanded by several orders of magnitude. The next update of the Parks telescope, carried out as part of Breakthrough Listen, allows it to simultaneously record radio signals from several million stars and distinguish between their sources.
This is made possible by the fact that the observatory is now equipped with 13 separate radio receivers, each of which can be configured to receive signals from different points in the night sky and simultaneously process over 100 million radio channels.
In total, Parks Observatory will allocate approximately 1,500 hours for these observations, as a result of which scientists will collect almost 100 petabytes of data in which traces of the existence of intelligent aliens may be hidden. Only a small part of this data, due to their huge volume, will be saved after primary processing.
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In addition to the arms of the Galaxy, the participants of Breakthrough Listen will also observe the stars in the central part of it, where, as some astronomers today believe, life should not exist due to frequent supernova explosions. Price and his associates hope that their experiments will help test whether this is actually the case or not.