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
Credit: Breakthrough Listen
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TechTranscript
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.