iblog

Whatever your theory about whether there is more life out there, the search certainly is hotting up as there is now a new telescope specifically dedicated to sweeping the skies for signs of it. The device will be one of the largest arrays in the world and has been funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The finished array, named the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), will have 350 six-metre antennas which will be able to sweep over more than 1 million star systems. It will work by detecting radio signals which will then be examined to see if they could come from intelligent life forms. The scientists and creators on the team are very excited by the new development, and even hope to spot “definite” signs by the year 2025.

ATA will be run by the Seti Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California. Senior astronomer on the team Seth Shostak says:

“For Seti, the ATA’s technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the Universe.”

Personally I am a little sceptical about the whole thing - even if we found radio signals, it would be very difficult to work out what made them “intelligent”, and surely it is a little presumptuous to think that aliens, if they exist, would be using such signals to contact us or otherwise. Thankfully, it is good to know the array will have other uses, such as helping us better understand the other mysterious phenomena in our universe such as supernovas and black holes which are currently only predictions and have not yet been observed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Technology, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.