Astronomers seek out alien TV

SIGNALS will be beamed into space next year to establish whether aliens are out there and watching television.

Astronomers plan to search 1,000 nearby stars for TV broadcasts and other signals that would indicate extraterrestrial life.

A spokesman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics said the project, planned for early 2008, would use a new radio telescope to search for radio traffic similar to that which is currently found on Earth.

At present, efforts to find extraterrestrial life are concentrated on searching for messages deliberately beamed across space, which would miss a civilisation that does not advertise its existence as the Earth does.

The beams would search for electromagnetic signals used on Earth for radio broadcasts, television and radar.

David Aguilar, the centre's director of communications, said: "We may pick up spurious signals from people that never meant for us to hear them and get an inkling that something's going on."

A new, low-frequency telescope under construction in the Australian Outback will be remote enough to avoid most radio interference.

The project will be able to detect Earth-like radio signals within a distance of 30 light years, which encompasses about 1,000 stars.

The project is set to be formally presented at a conference of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle in the United States on Wednesday.