Dear All,
Just wanted to share the below press release announced today at the
International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany.
As many of you know, the Listen MeerKAT program has been directly enabled by
CASPER technology and the collaborative spirit of the CASPER community.
As we launch the most significant observational test of one of the fundamental
hypotheses in SETI, perhaps we can look forward to chalking up one or two more
discoveries made thanks to CASPER.
Regards,
Andrew
For Immediate Release
Breakthrough Listen, the world’s biggest SETI program, to incorporate the
Southern Hemisphere’s biggest radio telescope – the MeerKAT array – in its
existing search for extraterrestrial signals & technosignatures
Expanding its global network to the African continent, Breakthrough Listen will
employ the MeerKAT Telescope in a powerful new search of a million nearby stars
Bremen, Germany – October 2, 2018 – Breakthrough Listen, the global initiative
to seek signs of intelligent life in the universe – announced today at the
International Astronautical Congress the commencement of a major new program
with the MeerKAT telescope in partnership with the South African Radio
Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).
Breakthrough Listen’s MeerKAT survey will examine a million individual stars -
1,000 times the number of targets in any previous search - in the quietest part
of the radio spectrum, monitoring for signs of extraterrestrial technology.
With the addition of MeerKAT’s observations to its existing surveys, Listen
will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in parallel with other surveys
“Collaborating with MeerKAT will significantly enhance the capabilities of
Breakthrough Listen,” said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough
Initiatives. “This is now a truly global project.”
Built and operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO),
and inaugurated in July 2018, MeerKAT is a powerful array of 64 radio antennas
in the remote Karoo Desert of South Africa. By partnering with SARAO,
Breakthrough Listen gains access to one of the world's premier observing
facilities at radio wavelengths. Signals from the 64 dishes (each 13.5 meters
in diameter) are combined electronically to yield an impressive combination of
sensitivity, resolution and field of view on the sky. MeerKAT also serves as a
precursor for the Square Kilometre Array, which will expand and enhance the
current facility in the coming decades, eventually spanning a million square
meters across South Africa and Australia to create by far the world’s largest
radio telescope.
The Breakthrough Initiatives’ Executive Director, Pete Worden, commented,
“Listen and MeerKAT are developing next-generation technology and techniques
that will ultimately lead to proposals for searches with the Square Kilometre
Array. This is an exciting moment for SETI and radio astronomy in general.”
Breakthrough Listen's involvement adds the capability to search for
technosignatures - signals that indicate the presence of technology on an alien
world, and hence provide evidence that intelligent life exists elsewhere.
MeerKAT was constructed in pursuit of a number of key science goals, from
surveying distant galaxies, studying explosive events such as supernovae and
mapping the distribution of hydrogen gas in the early Universe.
As at other facilities undertaking Listen's radio search, the new capabilities
have been enabled by the latest digital instrumentation installed by scientists
and engineers from the University of
California, Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC). Unlike the case with the
Green Bank and Parkes telescopes, however, the Breakthrough Listen team will
rarely use MeerKAT as its sole observer. Rather, observations will occur in a
commensal mode - at the same time as other astrophysics programs. Using
sophisticated processing, Breakthrough Listen scientists will digitally point
the telescope at targets of interest. This means that the Breakthrough Listen
instrument at MeerKAT will be operating almost continuously, scanning the skies
for signs of intelligent life.
"With this new instrument we'll be able to form many beams at the same time,
obtaining high resolution data for multiple objects simultaneously" said
Listen’s Principal Investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion. "This complements and
extends our capabilities at other telescopes, enabling us to survey our cosmic
neighborhood for technosignatures faster than ever before."
Justin Jonas, Chief Technologist at SARAO, said, “We designed MeerKAT to be a
flexible instrument that would provide standard interfaces to user-supplied
equipment and also allow for commensal observing. It is very satisfying that
these two design elements have made the Breakthrough Listen project possible,
allowing for a significant expansion of the original MeerKAT functionality.”
"Our new system is a small supercomputer," explained Dr. Griffin Foster,
Project Scientist for Breakthrough Listen on MeerKAT. “The powerful
Breakthrough Listen hardware will enable us to look for interesting signals in
real time and save the relevant data products to our on-site data archive."
The Breakthrough Listen system on the MeerKAT telescope will have a total input
data rate of about 4 terabits per second (4000 gigabits per second), which is
about 40 thousand times faster than a typical home internet connection.
Prof. Michael Garrett, Director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics
(JBCA) in the United Kingdom (a Breakthrough Listen partner facility) and a
co-investigator on Breakthrough’s MeerKAT Program, remarked, "This development
represents a step-change for SETI research. Employing a large distributed array
of hugely sensitive radio telescopes like MeerKAT is really a no-brainer,
offering many advantages over large single dish surveys. The Breakthrough
Listen MeerKAT project can be a powerful new tool for SETI with the potential
to completely transform the field."
Link to video launch
Survey details:
• Frequencies covered: UHF (580 - 1015 MHz), L-Band (856 - 1712 MHz),
S-Band (1600 -- 3500 MHz)
• Will survey 750000 stars per year at a maximum distance of 700 light
years with a sensitivity sufficient to detect (signal-to-noise 10, 1 Hz
spectral resolution) a 2 x 1013 W equivalent isotropic radiated power (Arecibo
radar equivalent) transmitter. Breakthrough Listen is a global astronomical
program searching for evidence of technological life beyond Earth. It aims to
survey one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby
galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical bands.
The Breakthrough Initiatives are a suite of scientific and technological
programs investigating life in the Universe.
For media inquiries: [email protected]
OR
Rubenstein Communications, Inc.
New York, New York
Janet Wootten
[email protected] / +1.212.843.8024
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