Stephen Hawking's search for alien life in the Milky Way galaxy will go on without him in Australia under a project backed by Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, News.com reported.
The project, called the Breakthrough Listen initiative, is a push to survey millions of stars in the Milky Way in a search for signals possibly from extraterrestrial technology, News.com said. A newly upgraded Australian telescope is helping in the effort.
Hawking threw his support behind the project before his death in March 14, News.com noted.
According to the technology website CNET.com, the hardware upgrade at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia allows astronomers to scan larger areas of the sky quickly and in more detail. The Listen project has been using the telescope for observations over the past year and a half, but had been limited to targeting just a small sample of stars within a relatively short distance from Earth, CNET.com noted.
The upgrade allows the system to process 130 gigabits per second of observational data from deep space, CNET.com said. The data will then be archived, open sourced, analyzed, and searched for possible alien-generated signals.
Danny Price, a project scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, said that the upgraded telescope will allow researchers to do so much more, News.com wrote.
"With these new capabilities ... we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail," Price said in a statement. "By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen."
CNET.com wrote that the project has already looked into mysterious signals called "fast radio burst" blips that appear to have come from distant star systems and checked out the first interstellar object to visit our solar system to see if there were signs of life.
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