This is the set of antennas spread over a desert terrain, which will be able to map the sky to try to find an extraterrestrial signal.
The human being does not cease in his efforts to search for extraterrestrial life, something that could receive a boost thanks to a set of radio telescopes that are located about 80 km west of Socorro in New Mexico.
“The VLA is the gold standard for radio astronomers, but this is the first time we’ve used it in a continuous, wide-ranging search for technology signatures,” he said. Andrew Siemionof the SETI Institute in a press release.
The VLA is an astronomical observatory that is made up of 27 antennas spread over 37 km of land in the desert.
Each one of these radiotelescopios is 25m in diameter and can be shaped into different configurations to capture signs of radio from space.
In the last six years, the observatory has been involved in the project known as VLASS (Very Large Array Sky Survey) which aims to survey 80% of the sky by radio.
The receiver, called COSMIC (Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster), is developed by the SETI Institute in collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Signals from an artificially constructed transmitter “would contain such narrow bands and their discovery could indicate the presence of an advanced community,” according to the study.
“COSMIC operates in a commensal fashion, which means that it works in the background using a copy of the data that astronomers are taking for other scientific purposes,” he said. Paul Demorestscientist and leader of the VLA/VLBA scientific support group at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The number of stellar systems examined would be about 10 million
A new experiment is allowing researchers to prioritize transmissions such as pulsed signals and transients, and the researchers estimate that the number of star systems examined will be approximately 10 million.
This system has been analyzing signals from the Voyager 1 spacecraft since early 2023, to verify the performance of the individual antennas in the array, and to combine their observations to produce a result that clearly shows the carrier and sidebands of the transmissions of the spacecraft. spacecraft.
“The COSMIC system is a fantastic example of using modern general purpose computing hardware to augment the capabilities of an existing telescope and serving as a test bed for the investigation of technology signatures in upcoming radio telescopes such as the NRAO Next Generation VLA. said Jack Hickish.
