From Carol Oliver, SETI
Your Newswire story about an Australian project to search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) leaves out one key adjective: amateur
(This Week, 21 November, p 25).
The story actually refers to an amateur group in
Queensland which would like to undertake a SETI project.
A professional Australian SETI project is being run by the University of
Western Sydney Macarthur, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation’s (CSIRO) 64-metre Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales.
This is a long-term project, currently scanning eight million radio channels
every 1.7 seconds and piggybacked onto normal radio astronomy observations. The
radio astronomy data are simply analysed in a different way to look for signs of
cosmic intelligence. This includes an all-sky survey currently discovering an
average of one new galaxy a day and a pulsar experiment that is finding one new
pulsar an hour. Interested readers can find out more from our website at:
http://seti.uws.edu.au.
Australia
