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Register a new userThe Breakthrough Listen Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
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The discovery of the ubiquity of habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, have ushered in a renaissance in the millenia-old quest to answer our most profound question about the Universe and our place within it - Are we alone? The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, announced in July 2015 as a 10-year 100M USD program, is the most comprehensive effort in history to quantify the distribution of advanced, technologically capable life in the universe. In this white paper, we outline the status of the on-going observing campaign with our primary observing facilities, as well as planned activities with these instruments over the next few years. We also list collaborative facilities which will conduct searches for technosignatures in either primary observing mode, or commensally. We highlight some of the novel analysis techniques we are bringing to bear on multi-petabyte data sets, including machine learning tools we are deploying to search for a broader range of technosignatures than was previously possible.
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New radio telescope arrays offer unique opportunities for large-scale commensal SETI surveys. Ethernet-based architectures are allowing multiple users to access telescope data simultaneously by means of multicast Ethernet subscriptions. Breakthrough Listen will take advantage of this by conducting a commensal SETI survey on the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. By subscribing to raw voltage data streams, Breakthrough Listen will be able to beamform commensally anywhere within the field of view during primary science observations. The survey will be conducted with unprecedented speed by forming and processing 64 coherent beams simultaneously, allowing the observation of several million objects within a few years. Both coherent and incoherent observing modes are planned. We present the list of desired sources for observation and explain how these sources were selected from the Gaia DR2 catalog. Given observations planned by MeerKATs primary telescope users, we discuss their effects on the commensal survey and propose a commensal observing strategy in response. Finally, we outline our proposed approach towards observing one million nearby stars and analyse expected observing progress in the coming years.
As a guide for astronomers new to the field of technosignature search (i.e. SETI), I present an overview of some of its observational and theoretical approaches. I review some of the various observational search strategies for SETI, focusing not on the variety of technosignatures that have been proposed or which are most likely to be found, but on the underlying philosophies that motivate searches for them. I cover passive versus active searches, ambiguous versus dispositive kinds of technosignatures, commensal or archival searches versus dedicated ones, communicative signals versus artifacts, active versus derelict technologies, searches for beacons versus eavesdropping, and model-based versus anomaly-based searches. I also attempt to roughly map the landscape of technosignatures by kind and the scale over which they appear. I also discuss the importance of setting upper limits in SETI, and offer a heuristic for how to do so in a generic SETI search. I mention and attempt to dispel several misconceptions about the field. I conclude with some personal observations and recommendations for how to practice SETI, including how to choose good theory projects, how to work with experts and skeptics to improve ones search, and how to plan for success.
We have conducted a search for artificial radio emission associated with the Kepler-160 system following the report of the discovery of the Earth-like planet candidate KOI-456.04 on 2020 June 4 (arXiv:1905.09038v2). Our search targeted both narrowband (2.97 Hz) drifting ($pm 4$ Hz s$^{-1})$ and wideband pulsed (5 ms at all bandwidths) artificially-dispersed technosignatures using the turboSETI (arXiv:1709.03491v2) and SPANDAK pipelines, respectively, from 1-8 GHz. No candidates were identified above an upper limit Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) of $5.9 times 10^{14}$ W for narrowband emission and $7.3 times 10^{12}$ W for wideband emission. Here we briefly describe our observations and data reduction procedure.
Breakthrough Listen is the most comprehensive and sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to date, employing a collection of international observational facilities including both radio and optical telescopes. During the first three years of the Listen program, thousands of targets have been observed with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), Parkes Telescope and Automated Planet Finder. At GBT and Parkes, observations have been performed ranging from 700 MHz to 26 GHz, with raw data volumes averaging over 1PB / day. A pseudo-real time software spectroscopy suite is used to produce multi-resolution spectrograms amounting to approximately 400 GB hr^-1 GHz^-1 beam^-1. For certain targets, raw baseband voltage data is also preserved. Observations with the Automated Planet Finder produce both 2-dimensional and 1-dimensional high resolution (R~10^5) echelle spectral data. Although the primary purpose of Listen data acquisition is for SETI, a range of secondary science has also been performed with these data, including studies of fast radio bursts. Other current and potential research topics include spectral line studies, searches for certain kinds of dark matter, probes of interstellar scattering, pulsar searches, radio transient searches and investigations of stellar activity. Listen data are also being used in the development of algorithms, including machine learning approaches to modulation scheme classification and outlier detection, that have wide applicability not just for astronomical research but for a broad range of science and engineering. In this paper, we describe the hardware and software pipeline used for collection, reduction, archival, and public dissemination of Listen data. We describe the data formats and tools, and present Breakthrough Listen Data Release 1.0 (BLDR 1.0), a defined set of publicly-available raw and reduced data totalling 1 PB.
Boyajian s Star (KIC 8462852) has received significant attention due to its unusual periodic brightness fluctuations detected by the Kepler Spacecraft and subsequent ground based observations. Possible explanations for the dips in the photometric measurements include interstellar or circumstellar dust, and it has been speculated that an artificial megastructure could be responsible. We analyze 177 high-resolution spectra of Boyajians Star in an effort to detect potential laser signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The spectra were obtained by the Lick Observatorys Automated Planet Finder telescope as part of the Breakthrough Listen Project, and cover the wavelength range of visible light from 374 to 970 nm. We calculate that the APF would be capable of detecting lasers of power greater than approximately 24 MW at the distance of Boyajians Star, d = 1470 ly. The top candidates from the analysis can all be explained as either cosmic ray hits, stellar emission lines or atmospheric air glow emission lines.
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