CANADA: Matthew Bailes isn’t convinced aliens exist but he’s going to give it his best shot to find out. Professor Bailes will lead an Australian contingent of researchers using the CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in a quest to find evidence of alien life. He will be joined by some of the world’s most eminent astronomers and astrophysicists after Russian billionaire Yuri Milner yesterday said he would spend at least US$100 million ($138m) on the quest.
“We’ve never seen any evidence of alien life,” said Professor Bailes. “But I certainly believe there are a ridiculous number of planets out there and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them develop life. Whether or not it ever gets to the point where it can communicate with us is another question.”
Professor Bailes, who has already discovered stars made of diamond and is hoping to count all the atoms in the universe, has a particular interest in pulsars, or fast-spinning celestial objects that emit radio, X-ray and gamma radiation at regular intervals.
“When they were first discovered in 1967, astronomers wondered whether they were an alien transmission. But they then noticed other signals coming from other directions which looked a bit the same, they decided pulsars were unlikely to be teeming with aliens,” Professor Bailes said.
“We now know pulsars are the most hostile environment in the universe and would be very unlikely to host any life form. The gravity is about one billion times stronger than on earth so it would crush anything that came near it. The stars are a bit like a giant cosmic nucleus that has incredible density of about 1 billion tonnes per cubic centimetre. It’s a big fat atomic nucleus and incredibly dense.”
Professor Bailes needs incredibly clear signals that are devoid of man-made interference to locate his pulsars and radio bursts in the far distant universe. It is these signals that, if anything, will detect the existence of alien life.
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