The Southern Hemisphere’s largest radio telescope is searching for aliens  

Increasing by a thousand times our goals

The largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere is MeerKAT and is located in South Africa. This huge tool will now participate in the search for techno-signatures, that is, signals that will indicate the presence of technology that has been developed by some extraterrestrial intelligence. A new technology incorporated into MeerKAT will allow it to increase the number of targets we can track by 1,000 times.

The team of engineers who developed this technology, which they call Breakthrough Listen , claim it is the most powerful equipment ever developed for techno-signature research. It is already installed at the Green Bank Telescope in the USA and the Parkes Telescope in Australia. But the advantage with MeerKAT is that its antennas do not need to move. The 64 satellite dishes that make it up can observe a patch of sky 50 times larger than the GBT.

Such a wide field of observation includes many stars that are interesting techno-signature targets. The new supercomputer allows us to combine signals from the 64 dishes to take high-resolution observations of these targets with exceptional sensitivity, without affecting the research of other astronomers using MeerKAT. – Dr. Andrew Siemion, Principal Investigator

The ability to simultaneously observe 64 objects in the sky will help Breakthrough Listen detect and reject interfering signals from satellites and spacecraft. His first target will be Alpha Centauri.

It will take just two years to search over a million nearby stars. MeerKAT will give us the ability to detect an emission from the nearest point to Earth up to 250 light years away, in its normal operation.