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.

00:10The newest thing, and the thing that we've never done before, is look at the million

00:15nearest stars.

00:17That takes us out about a thousand light years.

00:19So today, in 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

00:3464 telescopes that is the precursor to an even larger telescope that will be built in

00:39the next decade called the Square Kilometer Array.

00:43Breakthrough Listen is looking to observe up to one million stars with the Meerkat Telescope

00:49in South Africa.

00:52And so my project has been to develop the target list for this million star survey.

00:58So I've been working with the Gaia Data Release 2 data set as a starting point and trying

01:03to determine what of those targets will be visible to Breakthrough Listen.

01:08Today, Meerkat is probably the most sensitive radio telescope in the world.

01:12Not just probably, it is.

01:14And this really is going to allow people to image incredible regions of the sky that usually

01:20would take years to do in a matter of days.

01:23One of the key observational goals of the Meerkat program is to survey one million stars

01:28across a frequency band between about one and four gigahertz.

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

01:37The Breakthrough Listen program at Meerkat builds on the last three years of the Breakthrough

01:42Listen program, developing digital back ends for Parks and Green Bank.

01:46We've taken everything that we've learned and we're bringing it to bear on Meerkat to

01:50build the most powerful SETI search system ever designed.

01:53How do we look at the individual signals to see if there's evidence of artificial signals?

01:58And this is a very complicated and sophisticated set of hardware the University of California

02:04at Berkeley have perfected.

02:06This 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

02:13equipment and do commensal science with it.

02:16We can actually take a copy of all the data coming out of Meerkat at all times to be able

02:21to observe while these large science projects are doing their own survey, imaging, looking

02:26for pulsars, looking for transients, all the classic astrophysics.

02:31While they're doing that, we'll be able to use the exact same data to look for SETI.

02:35And that now works.

02:36It was perfected and shown to work on the Green Bank 100 meter and then now the Parks

02:41radio telescope in Australia.

02:43So we're building this set of electronics that is world class and brand new technology

02:49and it works.

02:50It's really exciting to be part of an unfolding mystery.

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