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ET search begins from Southern Hemisphere
By ROB STEIN
UPI Science Editor
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- A powerful new radio receiver began scanning the
sky from the Southern Hemisphere Friday for messages from intelligent life
from outer space.
About 100 people gathered at the Argentine Institute of
Radioastronomy outside Buenos Aires as the high-tech receiver was switched on
at 10:09 a.m. EDT and began monitoring more than 8 million radio
frequencies. Nothing was immediately detected.
"Nobody thinks it's going to get turned on and there will be a,
'Hello, how are you?' sitting there. But this is clearly a significant step
forward," said astronomer Carl Sagan beforehand.
The new receiver allows astronomers for the first time to
systematically search the part of the cosmos visible from the Southern
Hemisphere for radio signals from extraterrestrial beings.
"If we were extremely lucky, and there were some relatively nearby
civilization broadcasting us a message, but they were in the Southern
Hemisphere, we could have blithely been going on all these year and never
heard it," said Sagan, president of The Planetary Society, which set up the
receiver.
Although there is no evidence intelligent life exists on other
worlds, it is theoretically possible, Sagan said.
"A lot of scientists, the overwhelming majority, expect there's a lot
of life and intelligence," Sagan said. "The whole point is we don't know."
Astronomers are anxious to scan the sky from the Southern Hemisphere
because they will have access to some of the stars nearest Earth, including
those in the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.
"For the first time, we will be a very capable of searching for
extraterrestrial intelligence in the other half of the sky," Sagan said by
telephone from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
The $150,000 META II or Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay II
receiver will complement META I, which has been scanning the Northern
Hemisphere's sky from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Oak
Ridge Obseratory in Harvard, Mass., since 1985.
"We've sometimes detected some strange signals," said Thomas
McDonough, who runs the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
project, for the Pasadena, Calif.-based Planetary Society, which promotes
space exploration.
"In most cases we've been able to track them down as being from the
sun or our own civilization. We have on occasion detected strange signals.
But they have not repeated. The most likely explanation is they are from our
civilization. But we don't know for sure," McDonough said.
With its dish antenna 98 feet in diameter, the new receiver can
simultaneously scan 8.4 million radio frequencies, systemically moving across
the sky in search of incoming signals.
There have been previous searches, but the new receiver, run by the
Organization of Argentine Astronomers, will be the first permanent outpost
that will continuously sweep the entire sky, McDonough said.
NASA, meanwhile, is trying to get money for a 10-year, $100 million
SETI project that would monitor 20 million radio channels every second.