Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: The Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.
If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there is a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility would be the first to know.
“People have been asking themselves the question: ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” said Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.
Photo: AFP
For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures” — traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.
But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.
“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” said Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars.
The story of the “National Radio Quiet Zone” dates back to 1958, when the US federal government designated a region in West Virginia to help astronomers shield their sensitive equipment from interference. This means no radio signals, no cellphone coverage and limited WiFi for the surrounding community. Even the vehicles transporting staff to and from the telescope must run on diesel, as gas cars’ spark plugs generate electrical interference.
“I think the community takes a certain pride in having a premier scientific facility right here,” said Paul Vosteen, who has worked at the observatory for the past eight years.
Standing on the highest platform of the 100m giant dish, Vosteen gestures toward the Allegheny Mountains, which act as a natural barrier for radio signals in this bowl-shaped valley.
Radio astronomy began by happy accident when US physicist Karl Jansky discovered radio waves coming from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, in 1933. Since then, it has allowed astronomers to peer beyond the planets, stars and dust visible through optical telescopes. From discovering pulsars to conducting sensitive observations of atomic hydrogen that shed new light on galaxy formation — and more recently, detecting fast radio bursts — radio astronomy has been key to numerous advances.
There is also a long-standing theory that if other civilizations exist, they might emit radio waves, just as ours has since the dawn of radio communication in the 19th century.
In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, humanity is first alerted to extraterrestrial presence by a retransmission of Adolf Hitler’s opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics — the first TV signal strong enough to escape Earth’s ionosphere.
A framework for estimating the number of detectable civilizations scattered across the galaxy is found in the “Drake equation,” devised by the legendary astronomer Frank Drake. Now one of the most recognized formulas in science, it is even a popular tattoo and T-shirt choice among alien enthusiasts.
Each year, for a week in late spring, Breakthrough Listen’s team from the University of California, Berkeley, makes a pilgrimage to the telescope during a period of track maintenance for the 7.7 million kilogram structure.
“It’s a relaxing time; every time I’m here, it’s nice being in the National Radio Quiet Zone, because there’s no cellphone, no television — it’s a kind of focused environment,” said Matt Lebofsky, lead system administrator. “Sometimes we need to metaphorically kick the tires, do things ourselves to get a ground truth about how our servers are behaving.”
Inside the server room, the sound of 6,000 whirring hard drives holding 40 petabytes of data equivalent to 40,000 laptops makes it impossible to speak without shouting.
“We’re essentially looking for ‘weird things’ in the data,” Croft said, something that suggests life forms might be trying to reach out, or that scientists are picking up their accidental transmissions.
There have been a few moments of heightened excitement in the SETI community, including the 1977 detection of the so-called “Wow!” signal from the constellation Sagittarius, which remains unexplained.
More recently, in 2020, the team identified Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 from the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, but after extensive analysis, it was concluded to be human radio interference.
“It’s not deflating at all,” Lebofsky said.
On the contrary, he feels more optimistic than ever, given the vast amounts of data now being collected and processed compared to the early days.
“I feel like the chances are improving exponentially every year,” he said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens living at home and abroad would receive a payout of about US$478 each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind-boggling” oil wealth. The grant of 100,000 Guyanese dollars would be available to any citizen of the South American country aged 18 and older with a valid passport or identification card. Guyanese citizens who normally live abroad would be eligible, but must be in Guyana to collect the payment. The payout was originally planned as a 200,000 Guyanese dollar grant for each household in the country, but was reframed after concerns that some citizens, including
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done