Australia joins the Stephen Hawking-backed search for alien life

If "the truth is out there," Australia is going to help find it.

On Tuesday, the Parkes radio telescope in western New South Wales joined the Stephen Hawking-backed Breakthrough Listen project, which scours the universe for alien life.

Along with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California, the telescope will help survey galaxies close to our own for extraterrestrials.

Its first task on Monday night? Taking a look at the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri that could have a promising planet in its orbit.

So what's so special about Proxima Centauri? "Just that it's very, very close and that it's not too hot and not too cold," the project's Australian science coordinator, Matthew Bailes said. "We want a planet that's not too hot to boil all the water off and not too cold to freeze it."

Water matters because, as far as we know, it's vital to creating life.

Bailes is also leader of the Pulsar and Fast Radio Burst (FRB) research group at Swinburne University of Technology. "I'm kind of the 'Australian science champion' for the project," he told Mashable.

Breakthrough Listen is part of Breakthrough Initiatives, a series of research programs asking some big, big questions: "Are we alone? Are there habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood? Can we make the great leap to the stars?"

In 2015, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner founded the organisation in London with Stephen Hawking by his side. "These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilisations," he said in a statement about the Parkes launch.

Bailes' research group has used the Parkes telescope for years and know it inside out. "Normally, we search for pulsars and these flashes of light called fast radio bursts," he said. "We've discovered 15 or so using the Parkes telescope."

As it turns out, the kind of technology you need when looking for fast radio bursts is very similar to what's needed when you're trying to discover something unexpected, like say, like alien life.

"It's about maximising the dimensions of the telescope and the number of frequencies," he explained. "We're trying to tune in to about one billion radio stations, if you like."

The terabytes of data the Breakthrough project gathers will be used not only in the search for aliens, but also for more convention science like Bailes' fast radio burst research.

In fact, both projects face similar problems, especially dealing with all the man-made transmissions that are increasingly interfering with radio astronomy.

Bailes said the team would employ a technique that'll search for aliens but also search for interference, identify it and remove it from their signals.

"You can't find an alien without finding the interferences and getting rid of them," he said.

It doesn't take much to create an interference, he added. Even a cow bumping into an electric fence near the observatory could cause a small disruptive spike.

Despite Breakthrough Listen's technology, "alien hunting suffers from the tyranny of distance," Bailes said.

Essentially, we're looking for a life source that's beaming a detectable signal straight at us. When you consider how vast the universe is, it seems a remote but exciting possibility.

"Given the Earth has only been 'radio active' for 100 good years, the chance someone on the other side of the galaxy would be pointing at us would be pretty small," he added. "It's still a tough gig."