Russian Billionaire Funded Breakthrough Listen Program To Look For Aliens

Mankind’s obession with extraterrestrials isn’t new and for years alien hunters have been expanding their horizons. This is where Russian billionaire Yuri Milner comes in.

Milner, a billionaire technology investor with a background in physics who is also an alien enthusiast, funded the $100 million Breakthrough Listen Program to support the SETI Research Centre to search aliens in July 2015.

According to Wired, the Breakthrough Listen project was championed by the late Stephen Hawking and British astronomer Martin Rees. Like Jodie Foster’s movie Contact , this project uses radio telescopes around the world to look for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.

Within a month, a previously spotted fast radio bursts (FRBs) made a repeat appearance, but this time it was incredibly powerful and bright and dubbed as the repeater. Over the next couple of months, the burst showed up a couple more times, allowing researchers to determine its host galaxy. The Wired said localization was done with the Very Large Array (VLA), a group of 27 radio dishes in New Mexico that featured in the movie Contact .

The infrastructure at Green Bank Telescope which was upgraded by the Breakthrough Listen project caught repeating flashes many a time. And through this, researchers studied the host galaxy in more detail. “Detecting FRBs has become one of the main objectives of Breakthrough Listen,” says the Wired. One of the researchers, astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer, said netting the repeater was both a boon and a hindrance. While it eliminated models that cataclysmic events such as supernova explosions were causing FRBs, also deepened the mystery.

Researchers have established that the repeater lives in a small galaxy with a lot of star formation, says the Wired. Avi Loeb, an American theoretical physicist who is a chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, caused a frenzy in 2017 by suggesting that FRBs could be of alien orign, actually solar-powered radio transmitters that might be interstellar light sails pushing huge spaceships across galaxies.

But having completed analysis on data from 1,327 stars, which are located within 160 light-years of Earth, Breakthrough Listen project team have got nothing. However, this hasn’t deterred the the funder nor the astronomers to continue searching. The universe is vast and they (aliens) could very much be out there.