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: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: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!!