Jill Tarter and the Allen Telescope Array

An anonymous reader writes "Today's interview with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute (and Carl Sagan's inspiration for the main character of his novel Contact), outlines the forthcoming search capabilities of the large Allen Telescope Array. Their thousand-fold expanded search must find promising places to point 350 radio dishes. Outside San Francisco, the array spans an equivalent 8 football fields. Their new catalog, called HabCat, identifies all potentially habitable hosts for complex life within 450 light-years from Earth. Of the billions of places to point in the sky, their A-list total: 17,129. Start at Vega."

Comments

Re:Whats with the measurements??

[fgb]

1 parsec = 3.26 light years

Re:Whats with the measurements??

[richie2000]

Easy. A light year is like a leap year, except we set it on fire to light up the place a bit. A parsec is a fast-paced multiplayer cross-platform 3D Internet space combat game.

Or, it could be that a light year is the distance that a photon would travel on a standard solar year, in vacuum, while a parsec is the distance from which the radius of the earth's orbit would subtend an angle of one second of arc. One parsec is roughly 3.26168 light years.

Google is mother, Google is father. Worship Google.

Re:Whats with the measurements??

[vofka]

One Parsec = 3.26 Light Years.

More technically, One parsec is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends one second of arc.

See: This Site for a definition of the Parsec.
See: This Site for a definition of the Light Year

Re:Wow Signal.

[richie2000]

This article was linked from the article in the post.

Excerpt:

In the October 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's University of Tasmania, report on new observations (partially supported by the SETI Institute) designed to test this idea. Their new try was made at the 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania. This southern hemisphere instrument could continuously follow for most of a day the patch of sky (in the constellation of Sagittarius) where the "Big Ear" was pointing when it found the 'Wow' signal. They made six 14-hour observations, and even though their telescope was rather smaller than the venerable Ohio State antenna, they still had sufficient sensitivity to find signals only 5% as strong as Wow's 1977 intensity. They also covered five times as much of the radio dial as the original "Big Ear" telescope.

Bottom line? No dice. To quote from their article, "no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected..." Of course, if the signal's repetition cycle were much longer than 14 hours, then even this careful experiment could have easily missed it. But as Gray and Ellingsen point out, if the signal were really this infrequent, then the chance to have found it in the first place was very slim.

So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials? It might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim. Scientific experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical. This isn't just a sour attitude; it's the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself. So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the Wow signal will remain a What signal.

Re:Named for Microsoft founder Paul Allen...

[.@.]

You're joking, of course. However, before someone makes some MS-bashing comment, the system the SETI Institute will deploy at the ATA runs mostly on Linux. Debian, at the moment. What isn't Linux is Solaris, and that's mainly the control and data archiving system.

Re:how now brown cow

[.@.]

SETI@Home and the SETI Institute are two separate efforts.

Re:Looking at the tools...

[vofka]

Have a look at This Introduction to Very Long Baseline Interferometry at the Jodrell Bank Obervatory website - that will tell you (almost) everything you ever wanted to know about VLBI, and then some!!

Re:Looking at the tools...

[zer0vector]

Each measure is important in its own way. Large baselines give you greater resolution, or the ability to distinguish between objects that are very close together. Collecting area gives you greater sensitivity, or the ability to image fainter and farther objects. These apply to all wavelengths, from the radio up through x-ray.

Turn off that light!

[paiute]

After the events of the last few months, I am not so sure I want to be visited by an alien civilization - which is sure to have radically different notions of what behavior is justifiable - and that is sure to have unimaginable military superiority - and upon whom we can make no demands but have to accept their definition and conditions of our relationship.

Outside of San Francisco?

[Bruce Perens]

I've been to Hat Creek. It's next to Mt. Lassen. I suppose that San Francisco is the largest city near it, but it's 3-5 hours from there.

Bruce