The Search

Ramping Up The Search For Intelligent Life On Other Planets

A $100 million initiative co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and the late Stephen Hawking to detect signs of intelligent life across the universe announces a major systems upgrade enabling earthlings to probe tens of billions of stars for technologically advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms.

From article, (Installed by scientists and engineers from the University of California, Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC), the new digital equipment is capable of handling 130 gigabits per second from the Parkes 13 “multibeam” receiver. For reference, this is many thousands of times faster than your fastest home internet connection. It represents more than 100 million radio channels scanned for each of the 13 beams. Along with an increase in speed, the multibeam receiver better distinguishes between radio-frequency interference (RFI) emitted from our own technology (satellites, airplanes, smartphones, etc.) and errant signals that may possibly indicate non-human technology emanating from other worlds. Breakthrough Listen’s data will also be analyzed for signatures of fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs are equal parts puzzling and powerful flashes of radio light documented by various experiments at Parkes, as well as by Listen’s instrument on the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

“With these new capabilities,” says Danny Price, Parkes Project Scientist with the Breakthrough Listen project at UC Berkeley, “ we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail. By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”)

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