Giant Radio Telescope in Australia Joins Search for Alien Life

Australia's giant radio telescope, Parkes Observatory, will now join NASA's newly completed James Webb Space Telescope to search for alien life under a new project of the Breakthrough Listen Initiatives.

Russian entrepreneur and founder of Breakthrough Listen Initiatives, Yuri Milner, announced that the Parkes Telescope will now be included to other powerful radio telescopes around the world that will hunt for intelligent alien life in our deep universe. Among the other telescopes are Virginia's Green Bank Telescope and California's Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory.

 The Parkes Observatory is operating under Australia's CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), which is located in a perfect area to observe the skies that cannot be otherwise observed from the northern hemisphere.

According to the director of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Douglas Bock, the Parkes telescope can observe the center of the Milky Way galaxy and even larger parts of the galactic plane, including other parts near our galaxy.

Apart from this, Parkes Observatory is also the first to detect a "fast radio burst" which is a radio pulse that lasts only milliseconds and is emitted by cosmic energy bursts from outside the Milky Way. The Parkes radio telescope is also the first to observe an Earth-like alien exoplanet that orbits the nearest star system to our solar system, Proxima Centauri.

For the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, scientists from CSIRO, University of California, Berkeley, and Swinburne University of Technology are now working together to develop a signal processing and data storage system for the project. This data will be made available to the global science community.