Project Breakthrough Listen

A week ago the SETI institute gave a presentation on YouTube about a recent publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Frank Marchis interviewed Vishal Gajjar regarding a new method in project Breakthrough Listen. The project searches for technosignatures coming from extraterrestrial origins. These may be signs of technology that are alien in nature. Historically, the institute has used a very narrow frequency channel to define their parameters. Now they are looking for something nature doesn't produce, a train of engineered repeating pulses.

Like us, we can expect that aliens may have leakage from ordinary technology, but they may also have launched a transmitter into space for the purposes of communicating with us. A good place for them to put it would be the center of the Milky Way galaxy because it's somewhere both parties know where to look. Also, the stars are older there and there are billions of them with a large number of planets so it's a good shelling point to increase the chances of detecting something.

Currently the project is using the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. It is 100 m in diameter and operates anywhere between 1 GHz and 100 GHz. The team has about 20% time dedicated to the project, which is a really decent amount. For the recent publication the data included the survey of half a million stars in a 4.5 hour period. So far their total observation time is 25 hours. 

No signal has been found, but this is a first attempt and researchers are not discouraged. This is a major breakthrough in the search for extra terrestrial intelligence and the first of its kind in SETIs 60 year history. Credit goes to the graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Bryan Brzycki, who developed the algorithm. 

Tune in here for our episode on SETI.