Harvard's new telescope to boost search for alien life

HARVARD -- The search for intelligent life on other planets was ramped up by a factor of 100,000 yesterday.

A new telescope, unveiled by a group of Harvard University scientists, will soon begin scanning the heavens for bright flashes of light sent by aliens, the first time any telescope has been entirely dedicated to that task.

Housed in an unassuming wooden shed 30 miles west of Boston, the telescope is designed to detect a flash that would last just a billionth of a second, a sort of high-speed interstellar hello.

''It is overwhelmingly likely that life exists on other planets," said Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, who led the project. ''And while this search is undoubtedly a long shot, the payoff would be profound."

The modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been underway for five decades. Scientists built huge antennae to listen for interstellar radio waves and shot powerful radio frequencies into space hoping that someone would hear them. Harvard researchers sent radio waves from this 700-foot ridge in Harvard for two decades, until a windstorm broke the 84-foot-wide dish.

Around 1997 researchers started to think light signals might be a more likely way for aliens to try to contact Earth. Brilliant bursts 10,000-times brighter than our sun could potentially arrive in flashed patterns or contain vast quantities of information.

But the hunt for those laser blasts have, until now, always piggy-backed on other equipment. The new scope, on the grounds of the Oak Ridge Observatory, whose large telescope was recently dismantled, is the first dedicated completely to the mission.

Horowitz compared the previous generation of the Optical Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or OSETI, to searching the skies through a soda straw -- viewing only a very narrow spot of the heavens at once. This telescope, built for about $400,000, scans a broad line in the sky.

As the Earth moves, the stars pass through that line. In about 200 nights the scope can observe the entire sky visible from the northern hemisphere.

The pace of observation: 100,000 times faster than any previous scope.

To analyze the massive amount of data being sucked in through the scope's 72-inch mirror, a team of graduate and undergraduate students built a computer able to wade through 1 trillion bits of information per second -- about as much information as is contained in every book in the Library of Congress.

''The technology is absolutely on the cutting edge," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group of scientists and space enthusiasts that funded the telescope. ''It feels like the Wright brothers working out of their bike shop; they're using chips never seen before."

Friedman compared building the scope to launching a space ship. The stakes, he said, could not be higher.

If a laser flash is detected, Horowitz said, it would be months before any public announcement would be made, because scientists would first try to verify it.

If they did, it ''would end 4 1/2 billion years of Earth's cultural isolation," he said.

''It would be, without a doubt, the greatest discovery in man's history."

Curtis Mead, an applied physics graduate student at Harvard who helped build the scope's camera, was a bit more apprehensive.

''My girlfriend loves the movie 'Contact,' and like Jodie Foster said in the movie, 'If there's nothing else out there, that's a lot wasted space,' " he said.

''But truthfully, if we found something, I think it would be a little scary."

Douglas Belkin can be reached at dbelkin@globe.com.