The late professor Stephen Hawking was certain there was intelligent life lurking in the universe.
“The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant,” he once said. “Considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it’s extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life.”
So before he passed away on March 14 this year, he threw his support behind a project backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to find that elusive alien civilization.
Known as the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the project has begun a new push to survey millions of stars in the Milky Way for signals picked up by extraterrestrial technology — and a recent upgrade to a famous Australian telescope is boosting the chances of finding them.
A hardware upgrade which saw the CSIRO telescope known as “The Dish” equipped with a new high-powered receiver last year means researchers can eavesdrop on our galactic neighbors on an unprecedented scale.
According to CNET, the project has been using the Parkes telescope in NSW for the past year-and-a-half but had been limited to targeting just a small sample of stars within a relatively short distance from Earth. However, the new receiver allows scientists to peer deep into the galactic plane, which is where the majority of the Milky Way’s mass lies.
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