Scientists recently expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the development of a new device called the Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, an instrument that can detect infrared pulses transmitted across interstellar distances. On March 14, members of the NIROSETI team installed the device at the University of California’s Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton near San Jose.
In an interview with the UCSD Guardian, Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UCSD, explained the premise underlying optical SETI.
“Optical SETI looks for brief laser pulses that may be from extraterrestrial intelligence,” Wright noted.
According to Wright, infrared light serves as a more effective means of interstellar communication than visible light because of its capability to penetrate through interstellar gas and dust. Additionally, the transmission of infrared pulses is more efficient, requiring less energy to transmit the same amount of information.
“Blue light — the light that we see — gets absorbed easily by gas and dust,” Wright said. “And infrared light is able to sail its way through.”
Wright told the Guardian that the notion of using the laser as a means of interstellar communication dates back to Charles Townes, the UC Berkeley scientist who suggested the idea in a paper published in 1961. Charles Townes, along with Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in the field of quantum electronics, which contributed to the development of lasers.
“We had to wait until technology was good enough to build the receivers,” Wright noted. “We’re not building a large laser to send signals to other star systems. We’re trying to build instruments that can detect such a signal if extraterrestrial intelligence was communicating to us.”
The new technology Wright referred to can detect optical or infrared signals at a speed of one billionth of a second.
Wright also commented on the capability of the NIROSETI’s receivers.
“We’ve never had an instrument like this at this wavelength at this time rate,” Wright said. “And, who knows, we might discover something interesting or serendipitous.”
According to Wright, the long terms goals of the NIROSETI team is to run the instrument for several years and look at thousands of stars in order to get a signal.
“We’re actually making a very advanced signal processing which has never been done before,” Wright noted. “So we’ll be working on that and [will] also [be] look[ing] at interesting sources like pulsar stars and try to see if there is anything astrophysical.”
The NIROSETI team has been together for over a decade and was part of the main team that worked on the optical SETI instrument at Lick Observatory. Wright helped develop the NIROSETI while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The team consists of Shelley Wright, Dan Wertheimer, Jerome Maire, Patrick Dorval, Frank Drake, Remington Stone, Richard Treffers and Geoffrey Marcy.
Darren Charrier, a freshman aerospace engineer in Sixth College, told the Guardian that the NIROSETI reflects the recent growth of the privatized space industry.
“As the new privatized space industry is emerging, I think it will bring with it a wave of interest in what is out there,” Charrier observed.
Charrier serves as the business manager and national expansion manager of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space at UCSD. According to Charrier, SEDS is the first university team to design, print and test a 3-D printed rocket engine. SEDS is also working on a project called Moonshot Alpha, an interuniversity team to design, build and land a lunar lander on the moon.
