Anybody out there? UK scientists launch new ET search
09 Jul 2013
Some three years and a half after the UK shut down its official search for extra-terrestrial beings, British scientists are once again set to make a concerted effort to look for alien life among the stars.
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| The Arecibo message, a digital message sent to globular star cluster M13, is a well-known symbol of human attempts to contact extraterrestrials |
Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network called the UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN) to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). English Astronomer Royal and and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sir Martin Rees will act as patron.
Currently, SETI efforts are funded by private donations, but the UKSRN is eying government funds to give their search a boost.
The UKSRN carried out its first meeting at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2013) at St Andrews, Scotland, on Friday. The group is asking funding agencies for a small sum of money - about £1 million a year - to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis.
SETI efforts are still officially on in the US, and the new body hopes to coordinate findings with the US researchers.
''If we had one part in 200, or half a per cent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment, we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort,'' said Alan Penny, UKSRN coordinator and researcher at the University of St Andrews.
"I don't know whether (aliens) are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."
Currently, most SETI work is done in the US and is funded largely through private donation.
Penny said there was important expertise in Britain keen to play its part.
British researchers and facilities have had occasional involvement in SETI projects down the years.
The most significant was the use in 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix. This was a search for signals from about 1,000 nearby stars. Organised - and paid for - by the SETI Institute in California; it ultimately found nothing.
Jodrell has since been updated, linking it via fibre optics into a 217 km array with six other telescopes across England. Known as eMerlin, this system would be a far more powerful tool to scan the skies for alien transmissions.
Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said SETI work could be done quite easily without disturbing mainstream science on the array.
"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you SETI research almost for free," the Jodrell associate director explained.
"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least keep half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."
