The SETI Institute said earlier this month that the Very Large Array, a National Science Foundation telescope in New Mexico, will join the hunt for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilisations.
These signals would be technosignatures, so called because they are radio waves that can only be produced by artificial transmitters. SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has long focused on radio searches. Some unusual radio signals from deep space, like pulsars, were initially suspected to be alien in nature.
The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), named for an engineer who detected radio waves coming from outer space in 1931, began operating in 1980 and is run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. It is made up of 27 radio dishes, each of which is 24.99 m across. The telescope has spotted massive events like ancient galactic explosions but also detects weird radio signals from deep space, the sources of which remain a mystery. The latter will become a focus of the VLA, as the telescope hones in on radio emissions that could be associated with artificial sources. In other words, potential alien communiqués.
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