GREAT EYES ON THE SKY

Exciting developments in the search for extraterrestrial life

- Damien Martin

NO BREAKTHROUGH YET

Breakthrough Listen, the largest research program for discovering extraterrestrial intelligence, surveys the 1 million closest stars to Earth. Outside the Milky Way, which contains anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars and as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets within the habitable zones of stars like our sun, Breakthrough Listen scans for messages from 100 galaxies.

The telescopes that participate in the Breakthrough Listen program are 50 times more sensitive than others involved in the search. The Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia has the world's largest steerable radio telescope. The Parkes Observatory in Australia can search 13 places in the sky at the same time and can search a wide range of the radio spectrum. The Automated Planet Finder at California's Lick Observatory targets 1,000 stars and 100 galaxies and can detect a common industrial laser over interstellar distances. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa targets 1 million "nearby" stars.