Alien civilizations could use lasers to communicate over great distances, and now we could finally hear what they have to say.
LaserSETI, as it is called, scans the night sky for pulses of visible light that can be used to communicate large amounts of information, typically half a million times more bits than radio transmissions.
Operated by the SETI Institute, the new system is expected to bring us closer than ever to contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, assuming they are there, of course.
New optical detection equipment has just been installed on the rooftops of an existing building on Mount Haleakalā in Hawai'i, according to the University of Hawai'i. This will allow SETI researchers to monitor a larger area of the sky than ever before, looking for nanosecond pulses of light that could encode messages from alien life.
"The possibility that life exists elsewhere is exciting to the public, especially with reports of biologically interesting molecules in Venus' atmosphere, NASA's selection of two Venus missions, the Mars Perseverance rover mission and the next mission Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter's moon,” said Karen Meech, a professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.
"He has long been involved in astrobiology to explore the possibility of life elsewhere, both through research related to the formation of habitable worlds, the discovery of exoplanets, and the development of innovative new mirror and telescope technologies for detect planets. It's exciting to add a new direction to this research by investigating technology signatures."
Review: How LaserSETI Works
The newly installed optical sensors in Hawai'i will work with two existing sensors in Sonoma, California, at the Robert Ferguson Observatory to monitor the sky over the Pacific Ocean.
The operation of each device consists of using two cameras rotated 90 degrees to each other along an axis of vision. The cameras use a transmission network to divide the light sources into spectra and then reproduce the camera at a speed of more than 1000 times per second.
The two optical sensor cameras are capable of scanning around 75 degrees of the night sky, and while the light from the stars will produce a characteristic light spectrum, so will the laser pulses, which would be easily identifiable.
Using camera systems in California and Hawai'i, researchers can cover the same area of the sky from different angles, which will be able to filter out light signals that might come from passing satellites or aircraft using laser pulses for navigation and communication. . This ensures that any laser pulse signals they detect will be attributable to a source outside our solar system.
"LaserSETI is taking a big step forward in the search for technosignatures, that is, evidence of life beyond Earth," said Eliot Gillum, LaserSETI Principal Investigator. “This is the first optical or radio astronomical project designed to cover the entire sky. "
It also keeps costs low, so covering the entire night sky in each hemisphere should only cost € 5 million, a relatively small amount for projects of this scale.
Currently, 10 additional systems are installed at sites in Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands and Chile, which will be enough to cover the night sky throughout the Western Hemisphere.