The SETI Alliance, the Breakthrough Listening Initiative, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced the launch of a new large-scale project called COSMIC (Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster). It is designed to expand the scope of searching for traces of extraterrestrial civilizations by hundreds and thousands of times. The article was published in the scientific journal magazine Astronomical Journal (TANJ).
COSMIC will use a system of 27 Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes located in New Mexico, USA.
Unlike previous SETI studies that covered only a few thousand stars, the VLA will be able to listen for radio signals at frequencies between 0.75 and 50 gigahertz (GHz) in hundreds of thousands or even millions of star systems. This will allow the search to cover 80% of the entire sky; This is several times more than all previous SETI studies combined.
The COSMIC project will have access to real-time processing of recorded signals. Nowadays, even if something interesting is noticed during monitoring, this process can take weeks or months. Additionally, VLA antennas are capable of detecting radio transmissions lasting down to nanoseconds, increasing the chances of catching an alien wave.
As a test of the COSMIC system, the team listened to 8.4 GHz data transmissions from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is currently about 159 astronomical units (23.8 billion kilometers) from Earth.
According to the initiative, COSMIC will be the largest effort to search for intelligent aliens in history.
Earlier astronomers extended The search for extraterrestrial civilizations.