NEW TELESCOPE TO LISTEN FOR TV FROM SPACE

Internet UFO Group Media Archive

From:Doug Roberts
Title:NEW TELESCOPE TO LISTEN FOR TV FROM SPACE
Source:Sunday Times
Date:January 28, 1996


By Steve Connor - Science Correspondent.

AN AMBITIOUS plan to look for intelligent life on other planets and peer into

black holes with a radio telescope the size of 150 football pitches emerged in

Britain last week.

Scientists who met at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, where the first radio telescope

was built 50 years ago, said the new instrument would be hundreds of times more

sensitive than today's most powerful telescopes.

Unlike the Hubble space telescope, it will be able to focus on extremely faint

sources of radiation emanating from distant stars and galaxies. As a radio

telescope, it will also exploit a far broader range of the radiation spectrum

than Hubble, which detects only light.

The telescope, to be built over the next 15 years, will cover an area of 11m sq

ft, and measure nearly three quarters of a mile accross. It will be able to

detect radio signals from about 15 billion light years away - the outside edge

of the universe. Because this radiation has taken billions of years to reach

Earth, scientists hope it will provide new evidence about the Big Bang, the

primordial explosion thought to have created the universe.

"This allows us to see these galaxies at the time when they were forming. We

should be able to look back to 90% of the age of the universe. We don't know

exactly what we'll find." said Dr Robert Braun, an astronomer at the national

astronomy foundation in the Netherlands.

Dr Peter Wilkinson, a Jodrell Bank scientist who helped to organise last week's

summit, said one of the more ambitious objectives was to search for any

artificial radio signals eminating from the broadcasts of intelligent lifeforms

on other planets.

Present radio telescopes would only detect strong alien transmissions that were

deliberately sent in the direction of Earth, said Wilkinson. "If you had an

enormous telescope then you could pick up other transmissions, for instance if

they had radio or TV broadcasts. If other civilisations had a big telescope

looking at us they could tell there is something unnatuaral here just by our

radio and TV broadcasts."

Dr John Dreher, and American astronomer involved in the search for

extraterrestrial intelligence, said the new telescope would be sensitive enough

to detect TV-like broadcasts of alien life living between 10 and 20 light years

away. The giant telescope will eventually be linked electronically to smaller

radio telescopes in orbit around Earth to create a network of radio telescopes

with an even wider collecting area. This will enable astronomers to separate

two distant sources of radiation that are so close as to be indistinguishable

with conventional telescopes on Earth.

Wilkinson said one of the most important objectives of the new telescope was to

search for black holes, intensely violent areas formed by collapsed stars with

such strong gravitational fields that all nearby matter and even light is

sucked in. "We want to find out whether there is a black hole at the centre of

every galaxy, including out own," he said.

Traditional optical instruments, such as the Hubble telescope, are hampered in

their search for black holes by massive dust clouds which obscure their view.

Unlike light, however, radio waves can penetrate dust, enabling radio

telescopes to "look" inside black holes.

Because the new telescope will be 200 times bigger than Jodrell Bank,

strikingly different technology will have to be applied. Instead of one giant

steel dish, scientists envisage hundreds or even thousands of dishes, each

computer-controlled to focus on the faintest radio waves from distant starts.

Some scientists believe the telescope should be sited in Britain, because of

its distinguished history of radio radioastronomy, dating back to the discovery

of Radio Waves in space by Sir Bernard Lovell in 1947. Others favour rural

central Eurpoe or the desert of the Australian interior, where there is less

risk of radio interference from built-up areas.

The astronomers who met last week will draw up a detailed financial ploposal

over the next two two years to secure a 100-200m ukp to build the instrument.

It will come about through international collaboration, as the project is too

big for any one country.