China participates in finding aliens near abnormal star reduction

China's largest radio telescope in the world will participate in a project to search for alien intelligence near an unusual dimmer star.

Andrew Siemion, director of the SETI Research Center (looking for alien intelligence) at the University of California, Berkeley, said the center is partnering with China's FAST radio telescope operator to find Searching for signs of advanced civilization in the universe, South China Morning Post today reported.

FAST is the short name of the US $ 185 million, 500m , spherical spherical telescope , which has been put into operation in China in Pingtang District, Guizhou Province. The receiver of the device has a diameter of nearly 200m, an area of ​​more than 30 football fields and is far from the second largest telescope in the world operated by the US in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

SETI Center's Breakthrough Listen project was launched last year with a capital of 100 million USD, granted by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. This project will last 10 years and aims to find intelligent life in the universe.

FAST radio telescope has a disc surface area larger than 30 football fields. (Photo: NAO / FAST).

"Recently, the Breakthrough collaborated with FAST and the National Astronomical Observatory of China, the telescope manufacturer and operator , " Siemon said.

At the end of October, the Breakthrough Listen project started to direct a 100-meter Green Bank telescope in West Virginia, USA to a flashing star named Tabby , symbol KIC 8462852 , located in the constellation Cygnus, 1,500 years from Earth. the light. The star was first discovered in September 2015 by American astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.

Observations from the Kepler space telescope of the US Aeronautics Agency (NASA) show that the star is unusually dimmed over many days, unlike the planetary or stellar reduction phenomenon. brooms caused by other stars. One hypothesis is that light from the star is Dyson structure, a giant sphere created by a highly developed civilization around the star to collect energy.

"We looked at the star with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory with infrared, radio waves and high energy spectra, including a series of experiments but found nothing , " Siemion said. share.

But the FAST telescope started operating in September can bring new hope."With high sensitivity, the FAST telescope has a remarkable ability to study Tabby stars by finding radio waves. In the design frequency range, FAST is the world's most sensitive telescope, possibly detected the weakest signals, " Siemion said.

A researcher in Beijing who joined the collaborative project said they hoped to use FAST to search for aliens as soon as possible, but it was difficult to arrange time to observe because of the thick schedule. special of the glass."The schedule is tight. It's so tight that I think we can't do anything in the next two years , " said the unnamed researcher.

Zhu Jin, director of the Beijing Observatory confirmed that the Tabby star will be in the search area of ​​FAST. " Observing the Tabby star with FAST is very easy to do. When proposing to build a telescope, seeking alien civilization is one of the main goals. I think we can hardly ignore it. Tabby star , " Zhu shared.