A massive new telescope will soon begin scanning the skies for laser flashes from extraterrestrials.
Researchers are focusing on laser light because they think advanced intelligent beings would use it to communicate with us, rather than the far more primitive radio signal (related: "Alien Contact More Likely by 'Mail' Than Radio, Study Says" [2004]).
"Pulse lasers allow the sending of very bright light very far, very quickly," said Bruce Betts. Betts is a planetary scientist and director of programs at the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society, which funded the new telescope.
The telescope was custom-built for detecting extraterrestrials. It's the biggest optical telescope east of the Mississippi and is the first optical telescope devoted exclusively to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Optical SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) telescope sits in a farmhouse-like structure in rural Massachusetts, 40 miles (65 kilometers) away from the Harvard University campus in Cambridge.
When the telescope is up and running, a Harvard team will operate it remotely from campus, said team leader Paul Horowitz, a physics professor at the university.
In the past five years the team—using a much less powerful telescope, which scanned just a fraction of the sky—has noted more than a hundred "events," Horowitz said.
Because of the limitations of the equipment, the team was unable to determine if the events were actual communications.
"We have no idea if there really are aliens. The next question would be, If there are aliens, can we detect it? The answer is yes. With this telescope we now have a much better chance," Betts said.
Talk or Just Chatter?
The telescope will note any light signals that are 10,000 times brighter than a star and that pulse for at least a few billionths of a second.
This measure was chosen because it reflects what we on Earth are capable of sending, Betts said.
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