Scientists working with the Breakthrough Listen initiative have a powerful new tool at their disposal. A new instrument integrated into the Southern Hemisphere’s largest radio telescope has greatly expanded the search for extraterrestrial life, enabling it to detect techno-signatures of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT radio telescope is located in the remote Karoo region of South Africa and, since it first caught its light in 2016, has expanded our understanding of the cosmos by bringing to light and analyzing thousands of galaxies. It relies on an array of 64 plates to study the vast expanses of the sky, which has intrigued researchers working on Breakthrough Listen, a research program aimed at finding evidence of life beyond Earth.

Breakthrough Listening is currently doing this by scanning the sky for messages that could be sent by extraterrestrial intelligence, looking for so-called technical signatures with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Automatic Planet Search in the US and the Parkes Telescope in Australia. For the past three years, the team’s astronomers and engineers have been working to enhance this effort with a powerful new computer cluster for use with the MeerKAT telescope.

The team announced Thursday that the observations began with what it now calls the most powerful digital tool ever used to look for techno-signatures. Conveniently, it could help the team search without mechanically moving MeerKAT’s antennas, rather than using computer processing to get a new angle of what is already visible.

Breakthrough Listen principal investigator Dr. “MeerKAT consists of 64 antennas that can see an area of ​​sky 50 times larger than GBT can see at once,” said Andrew Simion. “Such a wide field of view often contains many stars that are interesting technical targets. Our new supercomputer allows us to combine signals from 64 dishes to obtain high-resolution scans of these targets with excellent precision, without affecting the work of other astronomers using the array.”

This will allow the Groundbreaking Listening team to use the capabilities of the MeerKAT telescope almost 24 hours a day, increasing the number of targets they can examine by a factor of 1,000. Among its first targets will be Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, which astronomers believe may contain potentially habitable Earth-size planets around it.

Breakthrough Initiatives Executive Director Dr. “One of the first targets we will observe is Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, which appears to contain two small rocky planets in the star’s habitable zone,” said S. Pete Worden. “Normal observations using the Listen backend on MeerKAT are currently underway, and the team looks forward to sharing the first science results in the coming months.”