Astronomers continue their search for extraterrestrial life by looking to team up with other researchers to coordinate their signal networks.
According to BBC News, "academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti)."
The English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, will be running Seti, who is asking for about £1 million a year to fund its research on finding alien signals. The money would go to listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis, BBC news reports.
The alien researchers are currently set up mostly in the United States and funded by private donations.
Coordinator Alan Penny for the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) told BBC News that Britain can play a key role in the research.
"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," Penny told BBC News.
"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."
BBC News reports British scientists have been involved with Seti in the past years, but its most significant contribution was from 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix.
The project, set up by the Seti Institute in California, involved a search for signals in 1,000 nearby stars. However, the research unfortunately did not lead to any new discoveries.
According to BBC News, Jodrell has been updated, "linking it via fibre optics into a 217km-long array with six other telescopes across England." The system is called eMerlin, and reportedly be a powerful asset to the alien research.
Jodrell's associate director Tim O'Brien said Seti work can be done without disrupting "mainstream science."
"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens," O'Brien told BBC News.
"This approach would get you Seti research almost for free...there are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."
