The Breakthrough Listen project completed a comprehensive survey of more than 1,700 stars searching for signs of alien technology. Unfortunately, no evidence of extraterrestrials was found, but the $ 100 million project took a giant leap in terms of its ability to continue the quest.
If at first, there was no success, the business is to try again, but with better tools and more refined techniques.
This is the feeling among the researchers involved in the Breakthrough Listen project, a 10-year initiative hosted by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and the late physicist Stephen Hawking.
Based on the SETI research center at the University of California at Berkeley, the project aims to find signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. Researchers are examining the cosmos using the GBT (Green Bank radio telescope) in West Virginia (USA) and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, among other tools.
The Breakthrough Listen team recently completed a search for 1,702 nearby stars, but no alien evidence was detected during the course of the survey, which took three years. It looks like a disappointing result, but the project has paved the way for more ambitious and sophisticated searches that are already under way. The work also resulted in two new research papers , which should be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The venture generated a petabyte, or one million gigabytes, of optical data and radio telescopes being made available to the public. As the breakthrough project press release pointed out, this is the largest dissemination of SETI data to date.
“I’m not that discouraged,” Andrew Siemion, the study’s co-author, said when asked about the outcome of the latest survey. “Seeing these new results submitted for publication is encouraging in and of itself,” he told Gizmodo via e-mail.
“These results will also help us come up with a more in-depth analysis that will set even stricter limits on the distribution of technologically capable life in the universe and give us a better chance of spotting something if it’s out there.”
Similarly, the lead researcher behind the Breakthrough Listen project, Danny Price, said he was not bothered by the results.
“We knew it was incredibly challenging and we’re still learning more about our data, creating new algorithms – and we’ll be using more telescopes in the future,” he told Gizmodo via e-mail.
The latest survey involved a sample of 1,702 stars, none farther than 169 light-years away. The search included a greater variety of star types than normal, including stars that are not similar to our Sun.
As demonstrated by the new project, however, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), has come a long way since its humble beginnings in the 1960s, when astronomer Francis Drake began to look seriously for intelligent aliens.
Most of the time, the research focused on the search for radio communication leaks, but the great new idea now employed by SETI researchers is the search for technology signatures, ie the evidence of advanced alien technologies.
This can include signatures produced by communications systems, propulsion devices, mega-scale engineering projects (such as Dyson spheres ) and even industrial waste, among many other possibilities. Thus, SETI researchers are refining their methods and technologies to tune to the applicable wavelengths.
Looking to the future, Breakthrough Listen scientists would like to tune into different frequencies and try to enhance a wider variety of signal types. Of course, they would like to target more stars.
The team will work with the Meerkat radio telescope matrix in South Africa. This instrument will allow the team to cover the same frequency range recorded in the new documents, but with a higher sensitivity – and crucially will involve the search for more than 1 million of nearby stars.