CSIRO radio telescope looks for intelligent life

The CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope has been used in an astronomical search for intelligent life beyond Earth.

Breakthrough Listen is a 10-year, $100-million astronomical search launched in 2015 by Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking.

The radio telescope is perfectly positioned to observe parts of the sky that can’t be seen from the Northern Hemisphere, including the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, large swaths of the Galactic plane and numerous other galaxies in the nearby Universe.

After 14 days of commissioning and test observations, ‘first light’ has been achieved, with an observation of the newly discovered Earth-size planet orbiting the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri.

“These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilisations,” said Milner.

Parkes has joined two US telescopes, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California, in their ongoing surveys to determine whether civilisations exist elsewhere and have developed technologies similar to those on Earth.

Dr Douglas Bock, director of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, said the Parkes telescope was one of the most highly cited radio telescopes in the world.

“The Parkes radio telescope has a long list of achievements to its credit, including the discovery of the first ‘fast radio burst’,” said Bock.

Swinburne University of Technology is working closely with University of California, Berkeley, and CSIRO to design and implement a signal-processing and data-storage system for the project that will make the Breakthrough Listen data available to the science community.

“The detection system on Parkes will be simultaneously searching for naturally occurring phenomena such as pulsars and fast radio bursts, which are a large part of Parkes’ present work,” said Professor Matthew Bailes, ARC Laureate Fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology.

“The Australian science community welcomes the opportunity to share the Breakthrough Listen data for other ongoing research projects.”

Breakthrough Listen will use 25% of the science time available on the Parkes radio telescope over the next five years.

The Breakthrough Listen science program is directly aligned with CSIRO’s strategy to operate world-class national facilities for the use of scientists, to ensure that those facilities are adequately and sustainably funded, and to facilitate the delivery of world-leading science outcomes and impact.

Dr Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley SETI Research Centre and leader of the Breakthrough Listen science program, said the chances of any particular planet hosting intelligent life forms are probably minuscule.

“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 said.

“To find a civilisation just 4.2 light-years away would change everything.”

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