Team behind the largest-ever search for alien life says it has NOT detected any signals yet – but insists ‘this doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligent life out there’
- Breakthrough Listen has published datasets from three years of searching
- It observes about 1600 stars using the Green Banks and Parkes radio telescopes
- The team says it has not come across any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence
An international team of scientists that’s spent the past three years scouring the skies for signs of alien intelligence has published the extensive dataset of their observations.
All in all, it makes for nearly 1 petabyte of data that’s now available to the public – or the equivalent of roughly 1,600 years of audio streaming.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative has been observing 1,702 nearby stars using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia and CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia.
An accompanying analysis of the data reveals the team, so far, has not come across any evidence of intelligence originating beyond our planet. But, they’re not giving up hope just yet.
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The Breakthrough Listen initiative has been observing 1,702 nearby stars using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia (pictured) and CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia
The data can now be found on the Breakthrough Listen Open Data Archive.
‘This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,’ said Dr Danny Price, who leads the team at the Parkes observatory.
‘We scoured thousands of hours of observations of nearby stars, across billions of frequency channels.
‘We found no evidence of artificial signals from beyond Earth, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligent life out there: we may just not have looked in the right place yet, or peered deep enough to detect faint signals.’
An analysis of the data, building off efforts presented in 2017, includes 1372 nearby stars.
It’s the most extensive radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted, according to the team.
The datasets include observations of the mysterious fast radio burst source FRB 121102 and scans of the interstellar asteroid `Oumuamua.
Scientists with Breakthrough Listen have submitted their results to the Astrophysical Journal.
And, with the information now public, they say anyone can participate in the ongoing search.
‘While we have been making smaller subsets of data public before in varying forms and context,’ Matt Lebofsky, BSRC’s Lead System Administrator.
‘We are excited and proud to offer this first cohesive collection along with an instruction manual, so everybody can dig in and help us search.
‘And we’re just getting started – there’s much more to come.’
WHAT IS THE BREAKTHROUGH LISTEN PROJECT?
Breakthrough Listen is a search for intelligent life using two of the world’s most powerful telescopes.
It was launched in January 2017 with the aim of scouring one million of the closest stars to Earth for faint signals thrown out into space by intelligent life beyond our own world.
Huge satellites, such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) are being used to detect radio signals from space
Scientists taking part in the $100 million are also scanning the very centre of our galaxy along with 100 of the closest galaxies for low power radio transmissions.
Breakthrough Listen will collect data over a 10-year period.
Search capacity will be 50 times more sensitive, cover 10 times more of the sky, 5 times more of the radio spectrum, and at speeds 100 times faster.
The project is currently using the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in Australia to search for radio transmissions from advanced civilizations.
In addition, the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory is being used to search for optical laser transmissions from other technological civilizations.
The initiative will span 10 years.
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