Scientists working as part of the Breakthrough Listening Initiative have a powerful new tool at their disposal. This instrument is MeerKAT, the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, equipped with a powerful supercomputer that will quickly and efficiently perform the task of quickly and efficiently searching for technological traces in signals of extraterrestrial origin.

The MeerKAT radio telescope of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory) is located in the Karoo desert region of southern Africa. This telescope has been able to gather a lot of information about thousands of galaxies since 2016 and has significantly improved our knowledge of the surrounding universe. Its 64 antennas simultaneously cover a large part of the night sky, collecting huge chunks of information, including information that may be of particular interest to extraterrestrial hunters.

Until recently, the Breakthrough Listen project included the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), Automated Planet Finder and Parkes Telescope. However, the MeerKAT telescope’s powerful computing cluster has been processing data from these telescopes for almost three years.

Of course, these studies are not done in a way that damages the main direction of the MeerKAT telescope, at most its further involvement in the Breakthrough Listen project will not even require moving its antennas. Instead, additional computer processing will be done to detect things of interest in the field currently in the telescope’s field of view.

“The MeerKAT telescope contains 64 “dish” that see an area of ​​sky 50 times larger than what the Green Bank telescope can see,” the researchers write. The supercomputer will combine signals from all antennas to obtain high-resolution scan results” in the background.

The introduction of the MeerKAT radio telescope means that the Breakthrough Listen project will be able to obtain new data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, increasing the number of targets examined by almost a thousandfold. Among the primary targets will be Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system, which is thought to orbit two habitable planets of comparable size to Earth.