Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million, 10-year initiative co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and the late Stephen Hawking to detect signs of intelligent life across the universe. Announced this week: a major systems upgrade enabling earthlings to probe tens of billions of stars for technologically advanced extraterrestrial lifeforms. The massive and detailed search for signs of civilizations on other worlds uses the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope (known as “Parkes”) in New South Wales, Australia. Listening observations at Parkes kicked-off in November 2016, surveying neighboring stars. With a wide range of radio and optical bands, the project is now targeting millions of nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and another 100 galaxies.
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.
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