• News
  • Lifestyle
    • Recipes
    • Video
    • Lotto Results
    • Technology
  • Entertainment
  • Travel
  • Sport
  • Expat Life
  • Move to Australia
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Australian Times News
  • News
  • Lifestyle
    • Recipes
    • Video
    • Lotto Results
    • Technology
  • Entertainment
  • Travel
  • Sport
  • Expat Life
  • Move to Australia
No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Lifestyle
    • Recipes
    • Video
    • Lotto Results
    • Technology
  • Entertainment
  • Travel
  • Sport
  • Expat Life
  • Move to Australia
No Result
View All Result
Australian Times News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

SETI: new signal excites alien hunters – here’s how we could find out if it’s real

Although the Breakthrough Listen team are still working on the data, we know that the radio signal was detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia while it was pointing at Proxima Centauri, which is thought to be orbited by at least one habitable planet.

The Conversation by The Conversation
05-01-2021 18:05
in News
New signal excites alien hunters

New signal excites alien hunters Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

Michael Garrett, University of Manchester

The US$100m (£70m) Breakthrough Listen Initiative, founded by Russian billionaire, technology and science investor Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, has identified a mysterious radio signal that seems to come from the nearest star to the Sun – Proxima Centauri. This has generated a flood of excitement in the press and among scientists themselves. The discovery, which was reported by the Guardian but has yet to be published in a scientific journal, may be the search for extraterrestrial intelligence’s (SETI) first bona fide candidate signal. It has been dubbed Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 or simply BLC-1.

Parkes radio telescope. CSIRO/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Although the Breakthrough Listen team are still working on the data, we know that the radio signal was detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia while it was pointing at Proxima Centauri, which is thought to be orbited by at least one habitable planet. The signal was present for the full observation, lasting several hours. It also was absent when the telescope pointed in a different direction.

Sun rises over rocky alien landscape.
Artist’s impression of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. ESO/M. Kornmesser/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The signal was “narrow-band”, meaning it only occupied a slim range of radio frequencies. And it drifted in frequency in a way that you would expect if it came from a moving planet. These characteristics are exactly the kind of attributes the SETI scientists have been looking for since the astronomer Frank Drake first began the pioneering initiative some 60 years ago.

While this represents remarkable progress in our pursuit of the ultimate question of whether we are alone in the universe, the BLC-1 signal also presents some food for thought on how we conduct these searches. In particular, BLC-1 highlights a problem that has dogged SETI research right from the beginning: disappearing signals. BLC-1 hasn’t been seen since it was first detected in the spring of 2019.

If BLC-1 finally emerges as a true SETI signal candidate, it will be the first since the “Wow! signal” recorded back in 1977. This is perhaps the most famous example of an inconclusive SETI candidate – it was never observed again. That doesn’t mean it cannot be extraterrestrial in nature. The perfect celestial alignment of moving and potentially rotating transmitters and receivers, separated by interstellar distances, is always likely to be a fortuitous and sometimes temporary circumstance.

Nevertheless, this represents a challenge for the Breakthrough Listen team. If BLC-1 is never seen to repeat, it will be very difficult to conduct the kind of detailed follow-up that will fully convince scientists that it was a message from aliens. Sceptics will rightly argue that this is more likely to be either a new form of human-generated radio interference or a rare feature of the complex observing instrumentation itself.

AlsoRead...

Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay

Australian Formula One race event postponed to November

14 January 2021
Microplastics are found throughout the Arctic Ocean

They’re everywhere: New study finds polyester fibres throughout the Arctic Ocean

14 January 2021

Indeed, it may never be possible to provide really compelling evidence of the extraterrestrial nature of a SETI event based on a telescope with a single dish, such as Parkes. This is especially the case for one-off events.

Ways forward

One way forward would be to abandon the traditional approach of using large single dishes for SETI. While a parabolic dish has the useful property of being sensitive to a fairly large area of sky, if a candidate signal is detected, there is no way of knowing exactly where it came from. So, while the Parkes telescope was nominally pointing at Proxima Centauri, literally hundreds of thousands of other galactic stars were also present in the field of view. Ultimately, any one of them could potentially be the source of the BLC-1.

We can overcome this problem by observing with several large dishes simultaneously, preferably separated by hundreds and even thousands of kilometres. By combining their signals using a powerful technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, we can pin-point the position of a signal with exquisite accuracy, such as to a single star.

For nearby systems such as Proxima Centauri, we can achieve a precision of approximately one thousandth of an astronomical unit (the distance between the Sun and Earth). This should allow us to identify not just the stellar system but the associated planet that transmitted the signal.

With such an approach, the motion on the sky of most signals could be measured in a year or even less. There are other advantages to observing with an interferometric array of telescopes, such as having many completely independent telescopes detecting the same signal.

In addition, radio interference from Earth wouldn’t be registered by telescope sites separated by hundreds of kilometres. So the human made interference that has contributed to so many false positives for SETI, and has included orbiting satellites and even microwave ovens, would completely disappear.

This kind of interferometry is a well established technique that has been around since the late 1960s. So why are we not doing SETI with it systematically? One reason is that combining data together from an array of telescopes requires more effort in almost all regards, including greater computing resources. An observation of a few minutes would generate many terabytes of data (1 terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes).

Hundreds of large satellite dishes in a desert.
Artist’s impression of the Square Kilometre Array. SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions – SKA Project Development Office and Swinburne Astronomy Productions, CC BY-SA

But none of these issues are show stoppers, especially as technology continues to advance at unprecedented rates. Perhaps a more important factor is human inertia. Until recently, the SETI community has been quite conservative in its approach, with staff traditionally drawn from single-dish telescopes. These scientists aren’t necessarily familiar with the quirks and foibles of interferometric arrays.

Luckily, that’s finally changing. Breakthrough Listen now looks towards incorporating arrays such as MeerKAT, the Jansky Very Large Telescope (JVLA) and eventually the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in their future survey programmes. In the meantime, prepare for a rising tide of ambiguous radio events – and hopefully the reappearance of BLC-1. Determining the precise location and motion of these signals may be the only way of reaching unequivocal conclusions.

Michael Garrett, Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tags: SB001
DMCA.com Protection Status

SUBSCRIBE to our NEWSLETTER

Terms and Conditions

CURRENCY ZONE

Australian Forex

Don't Miss

Australian Formula One race event postponed to November

by Mike Simpson
14 January 2021
Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay
News

The annual race in Melbourne was originally planned as the March opener to the 2021 season, but has now been...

Read more

They’re everywhere: New study finds polyester fibres throughout the Arctic Ocean

by The Conversation
14 January 2021
Microplastics are found throughout the Arctic Ocean
News

The Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the...

Read more

Free Horoscope for today, 14 January 2021

by Horoscopes
14 January 2021
Free Daily Horoscope - Astrology
Horoscopes

Keep your karma positive with these daily free horoscope readings!

Read more

What’s at stake for NZ in Australia’s case against China at the World Trade Organisation?

by The Conversation
13 January 2021
Australia’s case against China at the World Trade Organisation
News

By accident or design, Australia has appeared to be in the front line of Western criticism of Beijing — and...

Read more

Australia Weather forecast, alerts and UVB index, Thursday 14 January 2021

by Australia Weather
13 January 2021
Australia Weather

Be prepared for any weather with our daily forecast for Australia.

Read more

Four reasons to try CBD gummies

by Alan Aldridge
13 January 2021
Four reasons to try CBD gummies
Lifestyle

Today we are going to take a look at some of the reasons why you should try CBD gummies and...

Read more

Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

by The Conversation
13 January 2021
Mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification
News

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural...

Read more
Load More

Copyright © Blue Sky Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
australiantimes.co.uk is a division of Blue Sky Publications Ltd. Reproduction without permission prohibited. DMCA.com Protection Status

  • About us
  • Write for Us
  • Advertise
  • Contact us
  • T&Cs, Privacy and GDPR
No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Lifestyle
    • Recipes
    • Video
    • Lotto Results
    • Technology
  • Entertainment
  • Travel
  • Sport
  • Expat Life
  • Move to Australia

Copyright © Blue Sky Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
australiantimes.co.uk is a division of Blue Sky Publications Ltd. Reproduction without permission prohibited. DMCA.com Protection Status