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janrinok writes:

Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is warning that two iconic Australian astronomy facilities the Parkes radio-telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array at Narrabri, are at risk of closure after the federal government pulled $AU114 million from the agency's funding.

The cuts, announced in the government's May budget, have already stung part of the compact array, with its nearby Mopra telescope to run out of funds in 2015. According to CSIRO astronomy and space science head Lewis Ball, reported by The Guardian in Australia, the cuts mean "we have to make significant changes right now," adding that the cuts to the current year's budget happened with only "six weeks' notice." Ball was speaking to the Australian Astronomical Society's meeting, which took place last week.

According to Paul Girdler of the staff association, speaking to the ABC's AM current affairs program, part of the problem is that CSIRO also has to maintain Australia's commitment to the international Square Kilometre Array project. "CSIRO is going to have to cannibalise Parkes and Narrabri in order to keep funding the Western Australia operation," Girdler said.

takyon writes:

Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner have announced Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that will increase the intensity of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or their signals):

Speaking at the launch, Prof Hawking said: "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. "Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos - unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Those behind the initiative claim it to be the biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. They plan to cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes and scan five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster. It will involve access to two of the world's most powerful telescopes. - the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Yuri Milner is known for his creation and funding of Breakthrough Prizes, which award $3 million to researchers for achievements in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics. Also reported at Washington Post, NPR, El Reg, and Scientific American.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nothing to see here, just a galaxy or three... hundred:

Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor. Despite being just 250 million light-years from Earth — very close in astronomical terms — the new galaxies had been hidden from view until now by our Milky Way Galaxy.

Using CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope equipped with an innovative receiver, an international team of scientists was able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way into a previously unexplored region of space. The discovery may help to explain the Great Attractor region, which appears to be drawing the Milky Way and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies towards it with a gravitational force equivalent to a million billion Suns.

Lister Staveley-Smith, from The University of Western Australia node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, said the team found 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. "The Milky Way is very beautiful of course, and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," he said.

Statement at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, and another article at Space.com.

The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey (DOI 10.3847/0004-6256/151/3/52): article is also available here.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

A newly-released article in the Journal Nature reports on research which claims it has found the 'missing matter' that prior research had failed to identify.

The abstract's Editor's summary succinctly notes:

This paper reports the discovery, with the Parkes radio telescope, of a fast radio burst, FRB 150418. A multi-wavelength multi-telescope follow-up study detected a radio transient two hours after the initial burst, lasting about six days before fading to a quiescent level. The authors interpret this fading source as the afterglow of the FRB. Fast radio bursts are transient radio pulses lasting only a few milliseconds and previously it has not been possible to localize such a burst and determine a redshift. The source of FRB 150418 is identified as an elliptical galaxy with redshift of 0.492.

An article at Phys.org, New fast radio burst discovery finds 'missing matter' in the universe, elaborates:

[Continues.]

takyon writes:

UC Berkeley will use the Green Bank radio telescope to observe Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative:

Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star. "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby's star has looked at it," he said. "It's been looked at with Hubble, it's been looked at with Keck, it's been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found."

While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star's unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can't not take a look. They've teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.

The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.

Also at BBC.

Previously:
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Oumuamua's interstellar origin and unusually elongated shape has been enough to convince the billionaire-backed Breakthrough Listen to observe it to look for signs of alien technology:

The team's efforts will begin on Wednesday, with astronomers observing the asteroid, which is currently speeding away from our Solar System, across four different radio frequency bands. The first set of observations is due to last for 10 hours.

[...] Mr Milner's Breakthrough Listen programme released a statement which read: "Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimise friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust."

Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, who is part of the initiative, said: "'Oumuamua's presence within our Solar System affords Breakthrough Listen an opportunity to reach unprecedented sensitivities to possible artificial transmitters and demonstrate our ability to track nearby, fast-moving objects." He added: "Whether this object turns out to be artificial or natural, it's a great target for Listen."

Previously: Possible Interstellar Asteroid/Comet Enters Solar System
Interstellar Asteroid Named: Oumuamua
ESO Observations Show First Interstellar Asteroid is Like Nothing Seen Before

Original Submission

martyb writes:

New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life:

Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.

New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.

"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.

"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.