ET search begins from Southern Hemisphere

 ET search begins from Southern Hemisphere

 

By ROB STEIN

        UPI Science Editor

        WASHINGTON (UPI) -- A powerful new radio receiver began scanning the

sky from the Southern Hemisphere Friday for messages from intelligent life

from outer space.

        About 100 people gathered at the Argentine Institute of

Radioastronomy outside Buenos Aires as the high-tech receiver was switched on

at 10:09 a.m.  EDT and began monitoring more than 8 million radio

frequencies. Nothing was immediately detected.

        "Nobody thinks it's going to get turned on and there will be a,

'Hello, how are you?' sitting there. But this is clearly a significant step

forward," said astronomer Carl Sagan beforehand.

        The new receiver allows astronomers for the first time to

systematically search the part of the cosmos visible from the Southern

Hemisphere for radio signals from extraterrestrial beings.

        "If we were extremely lucky, and there were some relatively nearby

civilization broadcasting us a message, but they were in the Southern

Hemisphere, we could have blithely been going on all these year and never

heard it," said Sagan, president of The Planetary Society, which set up the

receiver.

        Although there is no evidence intelligent life exists on other

worlds, it is theoretically possible, Sagan said.

        "A lot of scientists, the overwhelming majority, expect there's a lot

of life and intelligence," Sagan said. "The whole point is we don't know."

        Astronomers are anxious to scan the sky from the Southern Hemisphere

because they will have access to some of the stars nearest Earth, including

those in the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.

        "For the first time, we will be a very capable of searching for

extraterrestrial intelligence in the other half of the sky," Sagan said by

telephone from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

        The $150,000 META II or Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay II

receiver will complement META I, which has been scanning the Northern

Hemisphere's sky from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Oak

Ridge Obseratory in Harvard, Mass., since 1985.

        "We've sometimes detected some strange signals," said Thomas

McDonough, who runs the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

project, for the Pasadena, Calif.-based Planetary Society, which promotes

space exploration.

        "In most cases we've been able to track them down as being from the

sun or our own civilization. We have on occasion detected strange signals.

But they have not repeated. The most likely explanation is they are from our

civilization. But we don't know for sure," McDonough said.

        With its dish antenna 98 feet in diameter, the new receiver can

simultaneously scan 8.4 million radio frequencies, systemically moving across

the sky in search of incoming signals.

        There have been previous searches, but the new receiver, run by the

Organization of Argentine Astronomers, will be the first permanent outpost

that will continuously sweep the entire sky, McDonough said.

        NASA, meanwhile, is trying to get money for a 10-year, $100 million

SETI project that would monitor 20 million radio channels every second.