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