The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 14, 2007

Official News page 10


REAL LIFE NEWS: THE SEARCH FOR ALIENS

by Hazed

SETI, or the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, has been going on for years, and it now has a new tool to help with the search for aliens. The first section of the Allen Telescope Array has been powered up and has started its task, listening to the stars.

The array has been funded in part by Paul Allen, who was one of the founders of Microsoft. Eventually, it's going to include 350 individual six-metre radio telescopes, all searching the skies for signs of alien intelligence. It will also be useful for more mundane astrophysics work such as mapping other galaxies, watching collisions between black holes, finding dark galaxies, and other such ordinary non-alien-chasing stuff.

The array's design is based on an off-the-shelf satellite dish, but it uses special signal processing software that clears out interference. Paul Allen put in $25M to get the venture off the ground, and now the partners - the Radio Astronomy Lab of the University of California, and the Seti Institute - are looking for about another $41M which is what they think it'll take to complete the array.

You can read more about the project in this New York Times story.


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