Keith Cowing: 20 years ago I made a trip to West Virginia to hang out with SETI researcher Jill Tarter and see how she searched the skies for evidence of life elsewhere.
We undertook observations with the Green Bank Telescope, simultaneously with the 300m telescope in Arecibo, as a follow-up of a possible flare of radio emission from Ross 128.
We report on a search for engineered signals from a sample of 692 nearby stars using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), undertaken as part of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
We use a statistical model to investigate the detectability (defined by the requirement that they are in causal contact with us) of communicating civilizations within a volume of the universe surrounding our location.
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is undertaking a comprehensive search for radio and optical signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Until now, SETI experiments (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), whether listening for a radio transmitter or searching for a high-powered laser, have assumed that ET is on-the-air all the time, so that wherever the instrument is pointed, the signal will be there. Laser SETI is the first experiment to circumvent this assumption.
Two fundamental problems for extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) attempting to establish interstellar communication are timing and energy consumption.
The discovery of exoplanets has both focused and expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
With the advent of modern astronomy, humans might now have acquired the technological and intellectual requirements to communicate with other intelligent beings beyond the solar system, if they exist.
Day Two of Breakthrough Discuss opened with Michaël Gillon describing the discovery of TRAPPIST-1, which has seven temperate planets, including three in the habitable zone.
Breakthrough Listen - the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe - has released its 11 events ranked highest for significance as well as summary data analysis results.
Regulations governing METI are weak or non-existent. Post-detection SETI protocols are non-binding and too general. Vastly increased SETI capabilities, Chinese involvement in the field, and an intensified effort by METI-ists to initiate radio transmissions to the stars are among reasons cited for urgency in addressing the question of appropriate regulations. Recommendations include regulations at the agency level and laws at the national level as well as international treaties and oversight.
Radio astronomy has traditionally depended on observatories allocating time to observers for exclusive use of their telescopes. The disadvantage of this scheme is that the data thus collected is rarely used for other astronomy applications, and in many cases, is unsuitable.
In a recent opinion piece Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute makes a strange claim: only Americans are interested in SETI.
The Kepler mission has shown that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-size habitable planet. A dramatic support was the recent detection of Proxima Centauri b.
Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star.
A Fourier transform analysis of 2.5 million spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was carried out to detect periodic spectral modulations. Signals having the same period were found in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range.
The National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) is joining forces with the Breakthrough Initiatives to launch a coordinated search for evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth
Suppose that advanced civilizations, separated by a cosmological distance and time, wish to maximize their access to cosmic resources by rapidly expanding into the universe.
If a sufficiently advanced civilization can either modulate the emission from an X-ray binary, or make use of the natural high luminosity to power an artificial transmitter, these can serve as good beacons for interstellar communication without involving excessive energy costs to the broadcasting civilization.