The University of Oxford in the United Kingdom has been selected as the new international headquarters for the world’s largest SETI project, the Breakthrough Listen initiative.
SETI, which stands for the Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, got a huge boost in 2015 with the launch of Breakthrough Listen. This $100 million private venture from the Breakthrough Initiatives foundation focuses on searching for technosignatures, signals or clues to technologically advanced alien species.
Breakthrough Listen was previously headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley, but its new international headquarters at the Department of Physics in Oxford will better take advantage of the Square kilometer array (SKA), a huge range of radio dishes and antennas in South Africa and Australia.
The SKA should be operational around 2030. It will transform radio astronomy, observing the radio sky with 50 times the sensitivity of other radio telescope arrays, and will be able to survey the sky 10,000 times faster. Physicists at Oxford have played a leading role in building hardware and writing software for the SKA, and will be able to tailor specific instruments for SETI.
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Andrew Siemion of the University of California, Berkeley, who has been Breakthrough Listen’s principal investigator since its inception, will join the Oxford team. “We are excited to launch a new era of listening here in Oxford,” concluded Breakthrough’s Executive Director, Peter Worden. “This collaboration will be an amazing convergence of knowledge, resources and passion to understand our place in the cosmos.”
“This is an extremely exciting collaboration, bringing a large-scale SETI program to Britain,” said Rob Fender, head of astrophysics at Oxford, in a statement rack. “This move recognizes how the University of Oxford’s existing astrophysics programs in radio astronomy instrumentation, astrophysical transients and exoplanetary studies make it the perfect foundation for Breakthrough Listen.”
The timing coincides with Breakthrough Listen’s other new collaboration with the MeerKAT array of 64 radio antennas in South Africa, which has been a technological precursor for the SKA. MeerKAT started listening up to a million stars for extraterrestrial radio signals in December 2022.
Breakthrough Listen, like most SETI projects, focuses on searching for radio signals, but also includes technosignatures in general. These are defined as evidence for the activity of technological alien species, but SETI astronomers deliberately keep the definition open to avoid human biases ruling anything out. For example, one area where astronomers look for technosignatures is in the area of anomalous astrophysical transients: bursts of energy or light with no apparent explanation, which could possibly come from extraterrestrial engineering on a scale far greater than we can imagine.
Breakthrough Listening scientists will look for anomalous astrophysical transients in data collected as part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to be conducted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, when it becomes operational in 2024.
Breakthrough Listen also looks for possible ‘megastructures’, gigantic non-natural objects, in transits detected by, for example, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the best example being Tabby’s Star, which was revealed in 2015 to experience irregular and very deep dimming events, caused by unknown objects passing in front of it and dimming its light. It was later revealed that the objects were huge dust clouds, but that any real megastructure orbiting a star would result in similar transit events.
In particular, the Oxford group will focus on the search for life on the nearest exoplanets. And all of the above will be done by developing new advanced technologies machine learning algorithms that can analyze large amounts of data faster and in more detail than more traditional methods.
Astronomers have already used machine learning to detect eight possible SETI signals with data from the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia.
Looking a little further ahead, proposals for one radio telescope on the far side of the moon that will be used for SETI will also be developed by scientists at Oxford. The far side of the moon is a radio-quiet region, shielded from any radio frequency interference caused by human activities on Earth, meaning it can gain unprecedented sensitivity for listening to weak radio signals.
