Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Jul 11, 2006 19:15:58 GMT -6
Sites under review for telescope that could detect alien TV
Astronomers are working to choose a site for a giant telescope that could read TV or radio signals from alien civilizations.
The instrument, called the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, would be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and would begin operation by 2020, if all goes according to plan.
Radio telescopes are devices that pick up radio waves, a type of light radiation that has less energy than visible light but that can provide valuable information on cosmic structures.
The SKA, designed to be 50 times as powerful as existing radio telescopes, would be deployed on an array of scientific projects, including studying the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies. The telescope, planned since the early 1990s as a collaboration of more than 30 research institutions in 15 countries, would also be capable of looking for distant civilizations—including by picking up their TV or radio transmissions.
Such a finding “would provide immediate and direct evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe,” project astronomers said in a presentation at a conference of the International Society for Optical Engineering in Orlando, Fla. in May. The telescope would for the first time “enable searches for unintentional emissions or ‘leakage’ at power levels comparable to that of terrestrial TV transmitters.”
Scientists also aren’t sure how to recognize such signals, if they do turn up. The hope is that they would feature organized patterns suggestive of intelligence, and not attributable to any known celestial sources.
Only the handful of stars closest to Earth would be within reach of the instrument’s TV-detection capacity, scientists estimate, although it could also detect radar signals at a much greater range.
Argentina, Australia, China and South Africa have submitted proposals to host the telescope, estimated to cost $1 billion. The number of possible sites will likely be narrowed down further next month, said Yervant Terzian of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., chairman of the consortium’s Site Evaluation Working Group and co-author of the presentation in Orlando.
By the end of August, the project’s steering committee will draw up a short list of acceptable sites that could contain anywhere from one to all four of the proposed locations, Terzian wrote in an email.
A final site decision will take up to two more years, and will also depend on the governments of the countries involved in the project, Terzian added. These governments are also the hoped-for source of SKA funding.
U.S. astronomers have been interested in hosting the telescope but, disappointingly, had to withdraw from the site competition “because of lack of funding to prepare a good proposal,” Terzian wrote in the email.
More here: www.world-science.net/exclusives/060711_ska.htm
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U.S out because of lack of funding to prepare a good proposal
All that means is that no one wanted to prepare the proposal on their own time or as part of their regular duties.
For shame!...
