Are we alone in the universe? UCLA astronomers enlist the public to find out

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Anyone can help classify radio signals from the Green Bank Telescope that could reveal existence of intelligent life elsewhere

Artist’s depiction of Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. A project launched by UCLA scientists will enlist members of the public to identify possible signs of intelligent life elsewhere in our universe. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.

Join a community that’s helping UCLA astronomers search for life in the universe using the Green Bank Telescope. UCLA SETI launched a new project to crowdsource the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. (SETI is an acronym for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”) 

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New Space Radar Will Hunt Planet-Threatening Asteroids

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The new ngRADAR at the Green Bank Telescope offers unprecedented Earth-based views of the solar system

Credit: Kerrick/Getty Images in Scientific American.

When a baseball pitcher throws a fastball, the speed pops up on the jumbotron thanks to radar. The technology is also useful for air traffic control, highway speed traps and weather forecasting—and it’s not reserved for Earth. Astronomers have used radar to probe the planets and asteroids around us, measuring their speed as they whiz around the sun and imaging the details of their surface.

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Planetary Defense & Science Will Advance With New Radar on Green Bank Telescope

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With less power than a microwave, prototype produced highest resolution images of Moon ever captured from Earth

With a transmitter less powerful than a microwave oven, a team of scientists and engineers used the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to make the highest-resolution radar images of the Moon ever collected from the ground, paving the way for a next-generation radar system to study planets, moons, and asteroids in the Solar System.

A Synthetic Aperture Radar image of the Moon’s Tycho Crater, showing 5-meter resolution detail. (click images above for full view) Image credit Raytheon Technologies.

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GBT, SETI, & the WOW Signal: the Search Continues…

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New radio observations of a distant Sun-like star thought to be a likely source of the famous WOW! signal reveal no evidence that the system harbors anything (or anyone) capable of sending such a signal. Nonetheless, astronomers say the “null result” is an important step in verifying a new, more targeted approach to searching nearby stars for traces of the mysterious WOW! signal.

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Scientists Reveal Secrets to Burping Black Hole with the Green Bank Telescope

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The National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) has revealed new information about mysterious radio bubbles surrounding a supermassive black hole.  

Observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (left image) and by GBO’s MUSTANG-2 instrument (right image) clearly show the enormous cavities (highlighted with gray circles) excavated by the powerful radio jets (green contours) expelled from the black hole at the center of galaxy cluster MS0735. The green contours in both images are from observations performed by the Naval Research Laboratory’s VLA Low-band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (VLITE) back end used on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Very Large Array (VLA).
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