Perhaps ET is just a solar system away, and perhaps all we
need is one more telescope to find him. That's the hope, at least, of some
scientists who say a new radio observatory being built in Europe may hold a
chance of finding alien life beyond our planet.
The Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR,
is a network of up to 25,000 small antennae being
built in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, France and the United Kingdom. The
distributed radio arrays will collectively scan the universe in the low radio
frequency of light when they are completed in 2009.
"LOFAR can extend the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence to an entirely unexplored part of the low-frequency
radio spectrum, an area that is heavily used for civil and military
communications here on Earth," said Michael Garrett, general director of
ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and professor of radio
techniques in astronomy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "In
addition, LOFAR can survey large areas of the sky simultaneously — an important
advantage if SETI signals are rare or transient in nature."
So far, the world's most famous
alien-hunting telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has been
unsuccessful in locating extraterrestrials. The giant dish, which has been
listening for radio waves since 1963, may even have to shut down in a few years
if it can't recover the funding lost since the National Science Foundation
decided to reduce its budget. LOFAR will scan a lower-frequency range of the
electromagnetic spectrum than Arecibo — the very range in which we Earthlings
broadcast television and radio signals. Some scientists hope that LOFAR offers
the chance to tune in to an alien
version of "I Love Lucy."
But others are skeptical of this
suggestion.
LOFAR will probably not be
sensitive enough to detect ET's TV, unless the aliens are broadcasting with much more
powerful television transmitters than we have, said Seth Shostak, a senior
astronomer at the SETI Institute in California. He calculated that an alien
version of LOFAR would have to be at a distance of less than one light-year
away from Earth to detect our television signals, which is closer than the
closest star.
Furthermore, broadcasting TV out
into space is already becoming passe on Earth, where most of us get our signal
through a cable in the wall, not rabbit ears on top of the set. Soon, we may
forego over-the-air broadcasting altogether.
"Presumably, ET has done all that, and to think that ET
television will still be broadcast into space the way we do, I think is being a
bit naïve," Shostak told SPACE.com. "The chances that they're at the same level
as us are very, very small."
Still, to those who spend their
time hunting and hoping for ET to finally phone home, any new tool that might
aid the quest is welcome, such as SETI@home, which allows people to donate their
personal computers' down time to the search.
"SETI searches are still only scratching the surface; we need to use as
many different telescopes, techniques and
strategies as possible, in order to maximize our chances of success," said Dan Werthimer, SETI@home
project scientist at the University of
California, Berkeley.
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