Our first contact from aliens probably won't be as simple as the 1997 movie "Contact," where Jodie Foster listens for otherworldly signals at the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
However, there is a teeny, tiny chance it does start at the VLA.
Astronomer Casey Law hooked up 24 parallel CPUs to that same VLA to parse the gobs of data the radio telescope receives from space. Law is part of an international team that traced one of the mysterious phenomena known as "fast radio bursts" (FRBs) to its source for the first time ever.
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