We’ve completed our analysis of 8 hours of Green Bank Telescope observations of “interstellar visitor” ‘Oumuamua. Billions of channels, covering the frequency range 1 – 12 GHz, were scanned, over an entire rotation of the object. A search for narrow-band signals ruled out transmitters ten times as faint as a typical cellphone — an impressive demonstration of Listen’s capabilities, given that ‘Oumuamua was 350 million kilometers from Earth at the time of the observations! You can read the paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02814.
As indicated in our press release, we are excited to be focusing our observational efforts on ‘Oumuamua, the mysterious interloper recently spotted moving rapidly through the solar system. Our ‘Oumuamua observation campaign will begin on Wednesday, December 13 at 3:00 pm ET. Using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, we will observe ‘Oumuamua across four radio bands, from 1 to 12 GHz. Our first phase of observations will last a total of 10 hours, divided into four “epochs” based on the object’s period of…Continue Reading “‘Oumuamua observations in 3,2,1…”
Exciting news: the HARPS exoplanet hunter team have discovered a new, Earth-like exoplanet orbiting around the star Ross 128, one of our closest neighbors. This newly discovered ‘exo-Earth’, designated Ross 128b, is particularly remarkable as it is thought to have surface temperatures similar to here on Earth. Curiously, this is the second time this year Ross 128 has been in the news. In May 2017, an intriguing signal in the direction of Ross 128 was detected at Arecibo. In July, we conducted follow-up observations with…Continue Reading “SETI observations of ‘exo-Earth’ Ross 128b”
Earlier this year, we submitted a paper on our analysis of 692 stars (press release). We are happy to announce that it has now been accepted for publication in AAS. For those of you who want to read all the technical details, you can delve into the 13-page PDF on arXiv:1709.03491.
The team at Berkeley SETI wrote a technical paper describing the super-wide-bandwidth Breakthrough Listen instrument at the Green Bank Telescope. It has now been accepted to the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a preprint is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06024.