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
00:00 What we're trying to do is look very carefully at the nearest stars, the nearest few thousand,
00:07 ten thousand or so. The newest thing and the thing that we've never done before is looked
00:14 at the million nearest stars. That takes us out about a thousand light years.
00:19 So today, in partnership with our colleagues in South Africa, we're announcing that Breakthrough
00:24 Listen is going to deploy the most powerful digital instrument ever used in the search
00:29 for extraterrestrial intelligence on the Meerkat Array in South Africa. A network of 64 telescopes
00:35 that is the precursor to an even larger telescope that will be built in the next decade called
00:40 the Square Kilometer Array.
00:42 Breakthrough Listen is looking to observe up to one million stars with the Meerkat Telescope
00:49 in South Africa. And so my project has been to develop the target list for this million
00:56 star survey. So I've been working with the Gaia Data Release 2 dataset as a starting
01:01 point and trying to determine what of those targets will be visible to Breakthrough Listen.
01:08 Today Meerkat is probably the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, not just probably,
01:13 it is. And this really is going to allow people to image incredible regions of the sky that
01:19 usually would take years to do in a matter of days.
01:22 One of the key observational goals of the Meerkat program is to survey one million stars
01:28 across a frequency band between about one and four gigahertz. This would be a thousand
01:33 times more stars than has ever been observed in this way.
01:37 The Breakthrough Listen program at Meerkat builds on the last three years of the Breakthrough
01:41 Listen program, developing digital back ends for Parks and Green Bank. We've taken everything
01:47 that we've learned and we're bringing it to bear on Meerkat to build the most powerful
01:51 SETI search system ever designed.
01:53 How do we look at the individual signals to see if there's evidence of artificial signals?
01:58 And this is a very complicated and sophisticated set of hardware the University of California
02:04 at Berkeley have perfected. This is really the secret sauce.
02:08 How they built the system is made it such that it's really easy to plug in your own
02:13 equipment and do commensal science with it. Basically take a copy of all the data coming
02:19 out of Meerkat at all times to be able to observe while these large science projects
02:24 are doing their own survey, imaging, looking for pulsars, looking for transients, all the
02:29 classic astrophysics. While they're doing that, we'll be able to use the exact same
02:33 data to look for SETI.
02:35 And that now works. It was perfected and shown to work on the Green Bank 100 meter and then
02:40 now the Parks radio telescope in Australia. So we're building these set of electronics
02:46 that is world class and brand new technology and it works.
02:50 It's really exciting to be part of an unfolding mystery.
02:53 [Music]