The Breakthrough Listen project hires the Parkes radio telescope (a city in Australia) to listen to a newly discovered planet orbiting the nearest neighbor of the Sun.
The radio telescope, located near the city of Parkes in Australia, this week joined the privately funded project Breakthrough Listen in the hope of finding evidence that a technically advanced civilization exists outside of the Earth.
The telescope's first target was Proxima Centauri - a red dwarf being the closest neighbor of the Sun. In August, astronomers announced that a planet the size of the Earth revolves around its star at a distance that allows water to exist (if there is one). Namely, this condition is necessary for the emergence of life.
It is likely that a small planet, known as Proxima b, is home to a technically advanced civilization. This is evidenced by Andrew Simion, director of the SETI research center at Califonia-Berkeley University. “As soon as we learned that there is a planet nearby, we had to deal with it,” said Simion, who heads the scientific program Breakthrough Listen.
“For the Parkes telescope, this was the first worthy observation,” he said in a statement.
Breakthrough Listen also uses two American telescopes - Green Bank in West Virginia and Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California. But none of them is located so as to observe Proxima Centauri and other targets in the southern hemisphere.
Breakthrough Listen is a 10-year project with a budget of 100 million to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is funded by Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner with the support of British physicist Stephen Hawking and other well-known astronomers.
The project, announced last year, began to look for signals not occurring in nature since January. So far this is the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence today.
