The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa is now searching for signs of alien life after a new powerful instrument upgrade. The new upgrade was announced by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao), with the goal to survey one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies using a range of radio and optical bands.
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“The new search for techno signatures — indicators of technology developed by extra-terrestrial intelligence — expands the number of targets searched by a factor of 1,000,” Sarao explained. The team is called the “Breakthrough Listen” group, specifically designated as a scientific programme searching for evidence of technological life in the universe.
“The new hardware complements Listen’s ongoing searches using the Green Bank Telescope in the USA, the Parkes Telescope in Australia, and other telescopes around the world,” Sarao said.
MeerKAT will use 64 dishes with a large field of view that typically contains many stars that are interesting techno signature targets, according to Dr Andrew Siemion. He is the principal investigator of the programme.
“Our new supercomputer enables us to combine signals from the 64 dishes to get high-resolution scans of these targets with excellent sensitivity, all without impacting the research of other astronomers who are using the array,” said Siemion.
MeerKAT’s capabilities means that the dishes don’t need to move and it is available for monitoring all the time, every day of the week. It operates in a “commensal” mode, which also means it can scan 64 targets simultaneously within the main field of view also improved the initiative’s ability to reject interfering signals from human technology, such as Earth-orbiting satellites, which have radically increased in the past few years.
“Routine observations with the Listen backend on MeerKAT are now underway, and the team looks forward to sharing the first science results in the coming months.”
