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
00:40the Square Kilometer Array. Breakthrough Listen is looking to observe up to one million stars
00:47with the Meerkat telescope in South Africa. And so my project has been to develop the target
00:55list for this million star survey. So I've been working with the Gaia Data Release 2 data
01:00set as a starting point and trying to determine what of those targets will be visible to Breakthrough
01:07Listen. Today, Meerkat is probably the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. Not
01:12just probably, it is. And this really is going to allow people to image incredible regions
01:18of the sky that usually would take years to do in a matter of days. One of the key observational
01:24goals of the Meerkat program is to survey one million stars across a frequency band between
01:30about one and four gigahertz. This would be a thousand times more stars than has ever been
01:36observed in this way. The Breakthrough Listen program at Meerkat builds on the last three years
01:41of the Breakthrough Listen program, developing digital backends for parks and green bank. We've taken
01:47everything that we've learned and we're bringing it to bear on Meerkat to build the most powerful
01:51SETI search system ever designed. How do we look at the individual signals to see if there's
01:57evidence of artificial signals? And this is a very complicated and sophisticated set of hardware
02:03the University of California at Berkeley have perfected. This is really the secret sauce.
02:08How they built the system is made it such that it's really easy to plug in your own equipment
02:14and do commensal science with it. Basically take a copy of all the data coming out of Meerkat
02:20at all times to be able to observe while these large science projects are doing their own survey,
02:25imaging, looking for pulsars, looking for transients, all the classic astrophysics. While they're doing
02:31that we'll be able to use the exact same data to look for SETI. And that now works. It was perfected and shown
02:38to work on the green bank 100 meter and then now the parks radio telescope in Australia. So we're building
02:44these set of electronics that is is world-class and brand new technology and it works. It's really
02:50exciting to be part of an unfolding mystery.
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