WASHINGTON: Millions in new funding will support the scanning of the stars for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life after a large donation announced this week.
Yuri Milner, founder of Breakthrough Initiatives, announced he was funding the start of a $100 million, 10-year project called Breakthrough Listen — which aims to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — at a press conference at the Royal Society in London on Monday.
For the project, UC Berkeley will collaborate with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Australia Telescope National Facility and the University of California’s Lick Observatory.
Dan Werthimer, chief scientist of the SETI@home project, said the inspiration for Breakthrough Listen partly came several months after Milner attended a lecture called “Are we alone?” by campus professor of astronomy Geoff Marcy.
“I think it’s a profound question: Are we alone? It’s a question that humans have probably been asking for hundreds of thousands of years,” said Werthimer. “We finally have the technology and the science where we might be able to answer that question.”
UC Berkeley has the largest SETI program of any university, according to David MacMahon, research and development engineer at the campus department of astronomy. He said the Breakthrough donation was an “unprecedented amount of money” at a time when research funding is “tight.”
According to MacMahon, telescopes collect data from a very large range of frequencies. The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, which will be used for Breakthrough Listen, is the largest steerable radio telescope in the world and can record a bandwidth of up to 10 gigahertz, he said.
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