Alien and Stephen Hawking Update: SETI Launches an Initiative to Search for Extraterrestrial Supported by Famous Physicist
The Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has launched the Breakthrough Listen initiative to begin studying Tabby's star or KIC 8462852 to find if intelligent aliens actually live around the "megastructure star." SETI will use the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to search for signals produced by alien civilizations.
According to Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, SETI will spend over $10M between 2016 and 2026 for the hunt-for-aliens project. SETI developed an instrument that will connect to the telescope to explore many billions of different radio channels as well as the radio spectrum quickly.
SETI will conduct first observations on Oct. 26, 2016. Observations will be done for eight hours for three nights over the next two months. The project is backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and will involve physicist Stephen Hawking.
Tabby's star is located about 1,500 light-years from planet Earth. Occasional brightness dips have been observed by NASA's Kepler space telescope since 1960s. A team led by Yale University post-doctoral student Tabetha Boyajian is credited for the discovery of the occasional brightness dips.
In Sept. 2016, Science News reported on the continued slow fading of Tabby's star. According to the website, the star's drama has befuddled astronomers who attributed the KIC 8462852's behavior to mundane comet swarms or alien engineering projects.
August 2016 data filed at open electronic-print archive arXiv.org by astronomers Benjamin Montet of Caltech and Josh Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington linked the dimming to a cloud of transiting circumstellar material. The data traced back the fading of the star between 1890 and 1989, which has been questioned by some researchers.
Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI, downplayed the likelihood of an alien megastructure causing the occasional dimming. But he added that they are going to check it out.
