Aliens All Around: New Stage for Hawking’s ‘Breakthrough Listen’ #SaturdayMorningCartoons
The Fermi Paradox, broken down by the excellent Kurzgesagt, will have some bearing on the next stage of an initiative to find alien life.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative to find technologically capable extraterrestrial intelligence created by Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner has reached a new stage. Using the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, Breakthrough Listen will scan millions of stars in the Milky Way’s galactic plane.
The initiative’s main goal is to find evidence of intelligent, technologically capable life beyond Earth.
Using radio surveys with instruments like Parkes, scientists aim to distinguish between human-made signals and “signals of interest,” or signals whose origins could be extraterrestrial.
The new Parkes campaign will continue Breakthrough Listen’s search at a whopping 130 gigabits per second — bandwidth that your laptop could only dream about. In addition to increasing the speed and scope of the search, the new multibeam receiverwill also give scientists the ability to better distinguish between signals of interest and human-made signals, such as radio interference from airplanes, cellphones and satellites.
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Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
