2007-10-11

There's no sign yet of ET, but an innovative network of radio telescope dishes largely funded by Seattle billionaire Paul Allen and aimed into space from a remote site in northern California is expected to soon prove its value for addressing more routine astronomical questions.

"This opens up a whole area in science," said Leo Blitz, director of the radio astronomy laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Nobody had ever tried this approach before," said Allen, who will join Blitz, scientists from SETI (the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence) and other organizations Thursday to officially activate the first phase of the Allen Telescope Array located in Hat Creek, Calif.

"The array in its first two decades will be able to check out more than a million star systems," said Seth Shostak, a lead astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

In the past dozen years, Shostak said, SETI has been able to carefully look for radio signals of about 750 star systems. He suggested comparing the SETI search so far to Jodie Foster's role as a scientist in the 1997 movie "Contact," in which she was sitting in the desert personally listening for telltale radio signals from some distant civilization.

"The Allen Telescope Array will be like 200 million Jodie Fosters sitting out there listening," Shostak said.

"We will be able to look at a much larger piece of the sky," said Blitz, adding that the sky survey can also be done much more rapidly allowing scientists a much greater chance to capture and study transient phenomena in space like exploding gamma ray bursts.

"They are the most energetic explosions we know of in the universe and we still really don't know what they are," he said. Blitz said the new telescope array could also identify new phenomena now missed by the static, narrow focus of many other telescopes.

Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, helped SETI and UC-Berkeley launch the project in 2001 with an $11.5 million donation. In 2003, the Paul G. Allen Foundation donated another $13.5 million to begin construction of the ATA, as it is known. Many believe that without Allen's support for this project, SETI may have had to cease operations.

At the Thursday event in Hat Creek, Allen and the others officially will start up the first phase of scientific observations by activating 42 separate radio dishes spread across the arid mountain landscape.

Most radio telescopes are extremely large, single dishes. The ATA, like some other telescopes, when finished will be a network of 350 dishes. These fairly simple 20-foot-diameter dishes can be moved around across the landscape to collect radio signals. The signals are fed into a sophisticated computerized system for digital analysis.

"They're like souped-up, old-style TV dishes that, gathered together using state-of-the-art electronics and computing, create a very powerful and flexible radio telescope," said Allen in an interview with the Seattle P-I earlier this week. "SETI is the long-shot of long shots, but we can also use this for regular radio astronomy."

Blitz said his graduate students have already obtained valuable new information by doing radio astronomical observations of hydrogen gas clouds in two nearby galaxies, Andromeda and Triangulum.

"We want to understand how galaxies evolve," Blitz said. "It's a hot topic in astronomy today."

The total cost of the project so far is estimated at $50 million. Allen's foundation paid half of that while SETI, UC-Berkeley, the National Science Foundation, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and others contributed the balance. Further funding will be necessary for the project to be completed in three years, as planned.

"We've proved it can work," said Allen, adding that he may contribute more money to the project. "I'm hopeful that given the many uses of this telescope others will be interested in funding it as well."

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