Breakthrough Listen Will Search A Million Stars For Alien Life

Space.com

Breakthrough Listen will scan the the skies with the aid of the MeerKAT Telescope. They are targeting a million nearby stars. [NASA's Planet-Hunting Probe Joins the Search for Intelligent Aliens]  Credit: Breakthrough Listen

Transcript

00:00What we're trying to do is look very carefully at the nearest stars, the nearest few thousand,

00:09ten thousand or so. The newest thing, and the thing that we've never done before, is looked

00:14at the million nearest stars. That takes us out about a thousand light years. So today,

00:20in partnership with our colleagues in South Africa, we're announcing that Breakthrough

00:24Listen is going to deploy the most powerful digital instrument ever used in the search

00:29for extraterrestrial intelligence on the Meerkat Array in South Africa, a network of 64 telescopes

00:36that is the precursor to an even larger telescope that will be built in the next decade called the

00:40Square Kilometer Array. Breakthrough Listen is looking to observe up to one million stars with the Meerkat

00:48telescope in South Africa. And so my project has been to develop the target list for this million

00:57star survey. So I've been working with the Gaia Data Release 2 dataset as a starting point and trying

01:02to determine what of those targets will be visible to Breakthrough Listen.

01:07Today, Meerkat is probably the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. Not just probably,

01:13it is. And this really is going to allow people to image incredible regions of the sky that usually

01:19would take years to do in a matter of days. One of the key observational goals of the Meerkat program

01:26is to survey one million stars across a frequency band between about one and four gigahertz. This

01:32would be a thousand times more stars than has ever been observed in this way. The Breakthrough Listen

01:38program at Meerkat builds on the last three years of the Breakthrough Listen program, developing digital

01:44backends for parks and green bank. We've taken everything that we've learned and we're bringing

01:48it to bear on Meerkat to build the most powerful SETI search system ever designed. How do we look

01:54at the individual signals to see if there's evidence of artificial signals? And this is a very complicated

02:00and sophisticated set of hardware the University of California at Berkeley have perfected. This is

02:06really the secret sauce. How they built the system has made it such that it's really easy to plug in

02:12your own equipment and do commensal science with it. Basically take a copy of all the data coming out of

02:19Meerkat at all times to be able to observe while these large science projects are doing their own

02:25survey imaging, looking for pulsars, looking for transients, all the classic astrophysics. While

02:31they're doing that we'll be able to use the exact same data to look for SETI. And that now works. It was

02:36perfected and shown to work on the Green Bank 100 meter and then now the Parks Radio Telescope in

02:42Australia. So we're building these set of electronics that is is world-class and brand new technology and

02:49it works. It's really exciting to be part of an unfolding mystery.

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