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Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, have pledged $100 million on a mission to find aliens on that planet we recently discovered.
The project known as Breakthrough Listen will use the world’s most powerful telescope to listen out for messages from potential extra-terrestrial life.
So it’s only fitting the three billionaires will be helping to fund the costly scientific mission.
Last month, astronomers revealed that our nearest star Proxima Centauri is likely to be the sun to another Earth-like world.
Mr Milner told the Daily Mail: “It came only a few months after Stephen Hawking and I, with Mark Zuckerberg’s support, launched our Breakthrough Starshot project, which aims to launch a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation.
“At the time, we hoped there was a planet in the Centauri system, but we didn’t know.
“Now we have a definite target. That makes the mission feel more tangible.”
Thousands of new planets have been discovered before but Proxima b – although four light years or 25trillion miles away – is believed to be the closest to our solar system.
Professor Hawking says he is backing the project as he believes we should find aliens before they find us.
Although adding we should be wary of reaching out to extra-terrestrial life if we find it, he said: “As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone.”
But Milner has a more celebratory response, saying if he did hear signals from an alien civilisation he would “take a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and start thinking about the message back.”
Next month, the Breakthrough Listen team will begin to look for radio emissions that differ from the normal background noise, using the Parkes Observatory in Australia which received live images of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
Researchers hope to avoid a false alarm similar to the ‘alien’ signals picked up by the RATAN-6000 telescope in Russia, but they say this could be trickier than it sounds.
Andrew Siemion, Director of Berkeley Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Centre, said: “Our notion of what types of emission are produced by technology is informed by our own technology…our own technology presents a significant interfering background.”
The Breakthrough Listen team has already collected data on other star systems using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia and Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder in California.
Agencies/Canadajournal
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