The National Astronomical Observatory of China is joining the Breakthrough Listen initiative, in which the world's leading scientists plan to search for signals from aliens in space, according to the press service of the Breakthrough Initiatives Foundation.
“Are we alone? This issue unites our entire planet. And the task of finding an answer to this question should also be solved at the planetary level. This agreement will allow us to search for fellow humans at once using the three largest telescopes in the world, located on three different continents,”said Yuri Milner, whose words are reported by the press service of the foundation.
At the end of July last year, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and British cosmologist Stephen Hawking launched the Breakthrough Listen initiative, in which Milner will allocate $ 100 million to support the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, which will be built on the basis of SETI developments.
One of the first actions of this project was the opening of the Breakthrough Message competition, in which Milner and his associates invited scientists from all over the world to formulate a short message to aliens that would help us find extraterrestrial life by the “opposite” method - by notifying it of our existence. The prize fund of the project is one million US dollars.
At the end of September, the PRC officially announced the start of the operation of the largest radio telescope on Earth - the 500-meter FAST radio dish, which will surpass the 305-meter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the previous record holder in terms of its sensitivity and capabilities.
After the FAST was completed, Breakthrough Listen invited the National Astronomical Observatory of China, which runs FAST, to join the search for extraterrestrial life.
NAOK director Jun Yan agreed to the proposal and, together with Peter Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Listen, signed an agreement to cooperate and begin joint observation of possible traces of extraterrestrial life.
In addition to FAST, two more telescopes will take part in the observations within the Breakthrough Listen - the Parks radio observatory in Australia and the telescope in Green Banks (USA).
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