“They haven’t really caught anything major, but the hope is that they’ll eventually find something that they’ll want to investigate further,” Warfield said. The program began in 2016 and is set to run through 2026. With $100 million in private funding, Breakthrough Listen is studying radio waves from our galaxy one million of the nearest stars and 100 of the closest galaxies for signs of alien life. Students also learned about the storied history of radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which continues at the GBT today through Breakthrough Listen, part of the Breakthrough Initiatives founded by Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking, and the most comprehensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) investigation to date. “I really saw how much of an engineering operation it is.”Īstronomy and physics students at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “It was invaluable just being able to experience hands-on the technology that we learned about that’s not like anything locally available,” Warfield said. Students used one of these - a manually operated 40-foot diameter telescope - to detect interstellar hydrogen in the Milky Way, which gave them a picture of where the galaxy’s spiral arms are. The roughly 35 students on the trip saw the control room of the GBT and heard from the telescope operator, as well as toured the rest of the Green Bank Observatory, which has several other telescopes on its campus. Within close confines of the telescope, cell phones must be turned off and non-diesel vehicles are prohibited, said Jack Warfield, a third-year astronomy and physics student who went on the trip. To operate efficiently, the GBT must be shielded from human-produced radio transmissions, which are heavily restricted in the area. “When most people think of telescopes, they think of optical light,” said Molly Gallagher, a graduate research associate in the Department of Astronomy who accompanied students on the trip along with Wayne Schlingman, assistant professor of astronomy and director of Ohio State’s planetarium.īut looking at different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum - looking at different types of light - can show us different information about the universe.”
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