located in a remote part of South Africa MeerKAT A new instrument used by the radio telescope, of Breakthrough Listen It will increase the number of targets it can observe by 1000 times.
A startup looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life. to Listen a team of engineers and astronomers involved, techno-signature He spent three years working on the instrument, which is said to be the most powerful piece of equipment ever deployed to aid his quest. Device, of MeerKAT Integrated with control and monitoring systems.
Listen, currently in West Virginia Green Bank Telescope (GBT) uses Parkes Telescope in Australia and others to hunt for techno-signatures. What is different from MeerKAT is that there is no need to physically move its antennas. Its 64 antennas can monitor an area of sky 50 times larger than GBT can image at once.
principal investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion “Such a wide field of view can reach many stars that are techno-signed targets and target with excellent precision without affecting other astronomers’ research,” he said in a statement. said.
The ability to simultaneously scan 64 objects, as well as monitor a larger area of the sky at a given time, Listen’s It will help it detect and destroy interference signals from human-launched spacecraft, such as satellites. One of the first targets the new vehicle will observe is Alpha Centauri. In 2020, Listen detected a strange radio signal from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun and a member of the Alpha Centauri system.
Listen project scientist Dr. Cherry Ng, “It will only take us two years to survey the more than a million nearby stars,” he said.