Related papers: Looking for Lurkers
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
A radio telescope placed in lunar orbit, or on the surface of the Moon's farside, could be of great value to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The advantage of such a telescope is that it would be shielded by the body of…
This paper briefly reviews some of the exciting studies of the local Universe that will be enabled with the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). As illustrative examples, it summarizes a few of the scientific goals that have been set…
With the discovery of the third confirmed interstellar object (ISO), 3I/ATLAS, we have entered a new phase in the exploration of these long-predicted objects. Though confirmed discovery of ISOs is quite recent, their utility as targets in…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
We are designing and constructing a new SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) instrument to search for direct evidence of interstellar communications via pulsed laser signals at near-infrared wavelengths. The new instrument design…
Stellar occultations provide a powerful tool to explore objects of the outer solar system. The Gaia mission now provides milli-arcsec accuracy on the predictions of these events and makes possible observations that were previously…
Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
Searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) using large survey data often look for possible signatures of astroengineering. We propose to search for physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology, by carrying out…
Nowadays many telescopes around the world are automated and some networks of robotic telescopes are active or planned as shown by the lists we draw up. Such equipment could be used for the training of students and for science in the…
The modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the seminal publications of Cocconi & Morrison (1959) and Schwartz & Townes (1961), who proposed to search for narrow-band signals in the radio spectrum, and for optical…
Traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or "technosignatures" focus on dedicated observations of single stars or regions in the sky to detect excess or transient emission from intelligent sources. The newest generation…
Co-orbital bodies are the byproduct of planet formation and evolution, as we know from the Solar System. Although planet-size co-orbitals do not exists in our planetary system, dynamical studies show that they can remain stable for long…
Stellar occultations have been used to search for Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects. We propose a search for interstellar objects based on the characteristic durations ($\sim 0.1 \mathrm{s}$) of their stellar occultation signals and high…
The idea that credible searches for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) could be carried out were laid out in detail in the (now classic) paper by Morrison and Cocconi (1959). They suggested using the radio band for these searches. Since…
The searches for other life and for intelligence are fundamental problems that science faces today. Most searches so far have been focused on radio, but optical laser communication is an alternative, well suited for a ground-based…
Direct detection of dark matter continues to elude scientists' many attempts to see it interact, and still to this day the only way we know it is there is through observed gravitational effects. The many search experiments are at the point…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…