The physics king and Facebook chairman will cooperate with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to carry out a $100 million project to search for signs of life on “copy Earth”. The research team of a project called Breakthrough Listen will use the world’s most powerful telescope to listen to messages from alien life forms, Express reported yesterday. This is a collaborative project between physics professor Stephen Hawking, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and businessman Yuri Milner.
Breakthrough Listen researchers will begin using the Parkes Observatory in Australia to search for radio signals distinct from normal cosmic noise next month. They hope not to encounter errors like the signal the RATAN-6000 telescope in Russia obtained last year.
Previously, they collected data on other star systems through the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia and the Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder in California, USA.
Last month, astronomers from the European Space Agency announced the discovery of the rocky planet Proxima b orbiting the closest star to the solar system Proxima Centauri, just 4 light years from Earth and able to concentrate suitable conditions for life to develop.
“The discovery was announced just a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with the support of Mark Zuckerberg, launched the Breakthrough Starshot project to launch a microscopic spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system. At that time, we “Hopefully there is a planet in the Centauri system but it hasn’t been identified yet. Now we have a clear goal, making the mission more feasible,” billionaire Milner shared.
Professor Hawking supports the Breakthrough Listen project because he believes humans should find aliens before they find humans. “As I get older and older, I become more and more convinced that we are not alone in the universe,” Professor Hawking said.