The Legendary Frank Drake Shaped the Search for Alien Life
Frank Drake, a leading figure in planetary astronomy and astrobiology who inspired the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, died Friday,…
Browsing Tag
radio telescopes
Astronomers Tally the Growing Carbon Footprint of Space Science
For generations, astronomers have spent lonely evenings at remote mountaintop observatories peering at stars and planets as they whirl overhead. Today’s…
4 Years On, a New Experiment Sees No Sign of ‘Cosmic Dawn’
When hydrogen atoms first formed, they absorbed and then emitted ambient 21-centimeter radiation at equal rates, which made the clouds of hydrogen that…
Detailed Footage Finally Reveals What Triggers Lightning
So Dwyer and his team turned to the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of thousands of small radio telescopes mostly in the Netherlands. LOFAR usually…
A Strange Radio Signal Was Just From Earth, Not Aliens
Last fall, a colleague of Sofia Sheikh’s posted a message in her group’s Slack channel, where members of the Breakthrough Listen Search for Extraterrestrial…
NASA Might Put a Huge Telescope on the Far Side of the Moon
The universe is constantly beaming its history to us. For instance: Information about what happened long, long ago, contained in the long-length radio waves…