Australian Radio Telescope Parkes Joins $100 Million Search for Alien Life

The Parkes radio telescope in Australia is the third telescope to begin searching for signs of intelligent alien life as part of the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project. Credit: CSIRO

Updated today 20/05/2020

$100 million search for intelligent alien life just added a big arrow to its quiver.

Breakthrough Listen has begun using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to scan the heavens, representatives of the ambitious, decade-long project announced Monday (Nov.7).

Parkes, Narrabri radio telescopes to be upgraded to improve Space Connect

The Parkes dish becomes the third telescope to be employed by Breakthrough Listen, joining the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in Northern California


"The addition of Parkes is an important milestone," billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which include Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. "These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilizations."

The Parkes radio telescope can tilt 60° from vertical and would take 15 minutes to perform a 360° rotation. photo: wikipedia.org

The first Breakthrough Listen observations for the Parkes dish came Monday, when scientists turned the telescope toward the Proxima Centauri star system to look for possible signals from alien civilizations.

Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the sun, lying just 4.2 light-years away from Earth's star. This past August, astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-size planet orbiting in Proxima Centauri's "habitable zone," the just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface.

It's therefore possible that the planet, known as Proxima b, may be capable of supporting life as we know it, scientists have said.

"The chances of any particular planet hosting intelligent life-forms are probably minuscule," Andrew Siemion, director of the University of California, Berkeley's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center, said in the same statement.

"But once we knew there was a planet right next door, we had to ask the question, and it was a fitting first observation for Parkes," Siemion added. "To find a civilization just 4.2 light-years away would change everything."

Proxima Centauri is also the target of Breakthrough Starshot, a Breakthrough Initiatives effort that aims to blast tiny, sail-equipped "nanoprobes" toward the system at 20 percent the speed of light using powerful lasers. Milner and a group of researchers, including famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, announced Breakthrough Listen in July 2015. Over the next 10 years, the $100 million endeavor aims to search the 1 million stars closest to the sun, as well as the 100 nearest galaxies to the Milky Way, for possible SETI signals.

The 210-foot-wide (64 meters) Parkes dish, which is operated by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), lies near the town of Parkes, in the state of New South Wales. The radio telescope famously helped relay live video of the Apollo 11 moon landing back to Earth in July 1969, a role featured in the 2000 film "The Dish."

Breakthrough Listen representatives also announced last month that the project would be teaming up with China's new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) — the world's largest radio telescope — to coordinate SETI observations.


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Was Venus Once A Habitable World Like Earth?

Experts assume that traces habitable landforms would have disappeared after a few hundred million years.

Until now, attention to the search for a habitable planet was focused on Mars, since it is assumed that it had a structure similar to Earth. There are, however, argue that we should take into account other variables such as, for example, Venus.

In a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of American researchers simulated the appearance that supposedly had a Venus, recreating how its surface showed, but the amounts of sunlight that reached here. The experiment results have led scientists to conclude that the planet was habitable in 2.9 billion years ago and 715 million years before, because here there is a temperature and water surfaces similar to those on Terra.

However, no evidence was found so far to indicate the presence of water on the surface of Venus, as it happens, for example, in the case of Mars. Here, researchers have identified the fingerprints of former rivers and oceans and believe that such structures could be found on Venus, but they were reshaped during volcanic activity occurred ago over 700 million years.

Experts have assumed, since Venus there was a habitable environment, should not exclude the possibility that there existed forms of life: ,, Both planets have oceans where water might have come into contact with rocks and organic molecules, giving rise to chemical processes. From what we know so far, these are the conditions that make possible the emergence of life, "says David Grinspoon, one of the coordinators of the study conducted by the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona.

Although Venus was habitable for nearly 2 billion years, it is uncertain whether complex life forms could have developed during this period. In this regard, we are given the example of the Earth, where the development of complex organisms lasted about 3 billion years.

Even if the history of living on Venus could be considered, scientists say, however, that we need much more information to reach a conclusion in this regard

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by iflscience.com . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.