The search for extraterrestrial life got an upgrade recently, writes the Daily Mail. A scientific team from the University of California Berkeley launched their Breakthrough Listen project back in 2016. The team has been using the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia to record any signals from space that it deems may be indicative of emanating from an intelligent source. The telescope recently got a new receiver hosting 13 beams and capable to scan the entire spectrum of the galaxy as seen from Down Under.
Pixabay Previously, the telescope could only focus on a relative pinpoint area of the cosmos for a short period of time, but now the updated receiver will give scientists a one year, 1,500 hour sampling across 100 million radio frequencies of the accessible galactic plane. “‘With these new capabilities, we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail,” said Danny Price, Parkes Project Scientist with the Breakthrough Listen project at UC Berkeley. “By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”
Pixabay In the cross hairs of Breakthrough Listen is the “region around the Galactic Center, one of the densest areas in the galaxy and home to a supermassive black hole,” writes the Daily Mail. Last April the team filtered out eleven sounds that they considered significant, but after further tests and studies they concluded the signals were not extraterrestrial in origin. In August of 2017 they netted 15 mysterious sounds coming from a galaxy 3 billion light-years away.
Wikimedia Commons The signals, known as fast radio bursts, are said to be a new onset of radio emissions originating from a source dubbed the ‘repeater’ – the first FRB ever known to repeat. The Mail writes that “according to experts with Breakthrough Listen, the discovery confirmed the source is in a newly active state, and marks the first time FRBs have been detected at higher frequencies.”
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