Breakthrough Listen, the largest ever research program aimed at finding evidence of advanced civilizations beyond Earth, today announced its first observations using Australia’s Parkes radio telescope.
CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. Image credit: Shaun Amy.
Parkes radio telescope, a 64-m parabolic dish operated by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), has recently 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 civilizations exist elsewhere and have developed technologies similar to our own.
Parkes is perfectly positioned to observe parts of the sky that can’t be seen from the northern hemisphere, including the Milky Way’s center, large swaths of the Galactic plane, and numerous other galaxies in the nearby Universe.
“The addition of Parkes is an important milestone,” said Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which include Breakthrough Listen.
“These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilizations.”
“Breakthrough Listen would do more than just hunt for ET,” added Breakthrough Listen project’s Australian science coordinator Prof. Matthew Bailes, ARC Laureate Fellow at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology.
“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.”
This artist’s impression shows Proxima b orbiting Proxima Centauri, which at only 4.23 light-years is the closest star to our Solar System. The double star Alpha Centauri AB also appears in the image between the exoplanet and Proxima itself. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.
Drawing on over 9 months of experience in operation of the dedicated Breakthrough Listen instrument at the Green Bank Telescope, a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center (BSRC) deployed similar hardware at Parkes, bringing Breakthrough Listen’s unprecedented search tools to a wide range of sky inaccessible from the Green Bank Telescope.
After two weeks of commissioning and test observations, ‘first light’ for Breakthrough Listen at Parkes was achieved this week with an observation of the recently-discovered Earth-mass exoplanet orbiting the closest star to our Solar System, Proxima Centauri.
Named Proxima b, the planet is in an orbit that would allow it to have liquid water on its surface.
Such potentially habitable, terrestrial worlds are among the primary targets for Breakthrough Listen.
“The chances of any particular planet hosting intelligent life-forms are probably minuscule,” said BSRC director Dr. Andrew Siemion.
“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.”
“To find a civilization just 4.23 light-years away would change everything.”
As the closest known exoplanet, Proxima b is also the current primary target for Breakthrough Listen’s sister initiative, Breakthrough Starshot, which is developing the technology to send gram-scale spacecraft to the nearest stars.
