Inside the ‘Golden Age’ of Alien Hunting at the Green Bank Telescope

Nestled among the mountains in a remote corner of West Virginia, a giant is awakening: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance that teams analyzing data from the world’s largest fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know about it.

“People have been asking the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first looked up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds,” says Steve Croft, a scientist with the Breakthrough Listen project.

Over the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific initiative has partnered with a pioneering U.S. government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology from far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” has long been considered the domain of eccentrics and was even cut from federal funding by Congress three decades ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky harbors planets, many of them Earth-like.

“I feel like we’re living in a kind of golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena from supermassive black holes to emissions from exploding stars.

Is ET calling?

The history of the National Radio Quiet Zone dates back to 1958, when the U.S. federal government designated an area in West Virginia to help astronomers protect their sensitive equipment from interference.

This means there is no radio signal, no cell phone coverage, and limited Wi-Fi for local residents. Even the vehicles that transport staff to and from the telescope must run on diesel, because the spark plugs in gasoline-powered cars generate electrical interference.

“I think the community is proud to have a world-class science facility here,” says Paul Vosteen, who has worked at the observatory for eight years.

Standing on the highest platform of the giant 100-meter satellite dish, Vosteen gestures toward the Allegheny Mountains, which act as a natural barrier to radio signals in this bowl-shaped valley.

Radio astronomy began as a happy accident when American physicist Karl Jansky discovered radio waves coming from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, in 1933.

Since then, it has allowed astronomers to see beyond the planets, stars and dust visible through optical telescopes.

From the discovery of pulsars to the sensitive observations of atomic hydrogen that shed new light on galaxy formation, and more recently, the detection of fast radio bursts, radio astronomy has been the key to many advances.

There is also a long-standing theory that if other civilizations exist, they might emit radio waves, just as ours has done since the dawn of radio communication in the 19th century.

In Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact,” humanity is first alerted to the alien presence by a broadcast of Adolf Hitler’s opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics, the first television signal powerful enough to escape the Earth’s ionosphere.

The Drake equation, devised by legendary astronomer Frank Drake, is a way to estimate the number of detectable civilizations scattered throughout the galaxy. Now one of the most recognized formulas in science, it’s even a popular tattoo and t-shirt choice among alien enthusiasts.

“The odds are improving”

Every year, for a week in late spring, the Breakthrough Listen team from the University of California, Berkeley, makes a pilgrimage to the telescope during a period of track maintenance on the 17-million-pound structure.

“It’s a relaxing time; every time I’m here, it’s nice to be in the quiet zone of national radio because there’s no cell phones, no TVs – it’s kind of a focused environment,” says Matt Lebofsky, the system’s senior administrator.

“Sometimes we have to metaphorically test things, do things ourselves to get a clear idea of ​​how our servers are behaving.”

Inside the server room, the noise of 6,000 whirring hard drives containing 40 petabytes of data – the equivalent of 40,000 laptops – makes it impossible to speak without shouting.

“We’re basically looking for ‘weird things’ in the data,” Croft says, something that suggests life forms might be trying to reach outside, or that scientists are picking up their accidental transmissions.

There have been a few moments of heightened excitement in the SETI community, including the detection in 1977 of the so-called “Wow!” signal from the constellation Sagittarius, which remains unexplained.

More recently, in 2020, the team identified the Breakthrough Listen 1 candidate from the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, but after further analysis it was concluded that it was human radio interference.

“It’s not a disappointment at all,” Lebofsky insists. On the contrary, he feels more optimistic than ever, given the enormous amounts of data being collected and processed today compared to the early days. “I feel like the odds are improving exponentially every year.”

© 2024 AFP