Related papers: Concepts for future missions to search for technos…
The discovery of the ubiquity of habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, have ushered in a renaissance in the millenia-old quest to answer our most profound…
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…
EarthFinder is a NASA Astrophysics Probe mission concept selected for study as input to the 2020 Astrophysics National Academies Decadal Survey. The EarthFinder concept is based on a dramatic shift in our understanding of how PRV…
The Search for Extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific and cultural effort seeking evidence of intelligent life beyond earth. Radio SETI observes the radio spectrum for ''technosignatures" that could be produced by an advanced…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has historically focused on detecting electromagnetic technosignatures, implicitly assuming that alien civilisations are biological and technologically analogous to ourselves. This paper…
High-energy SETI pushes astrobiology to its limits, testing the most fundamental needs of life and the most extreme limits of technology. It has lagged behind the rest of the field, but the increased respectability of SETI could spark…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
We explore a much-neglected area of SETI: solar system techno-signatures. As our cursory solar system exploration consolidates into commercial industrialisation, it is crucial that we determine what to look for and where. We first consider…
The idea of searching for optical signals from extraterrestrial civilizations has become increasingly popular over the last five years, with dedicated projects at a number of observatories. The method relies on the detection of a brief (few…
THESEUS, one of the two space mission concepts being studied by ESA as candidates for next M5 mission within its Comsic Vision programme, aims at fully exploiting Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) to solve key questions about the early Universe, as…
Transmission spectra probe the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, but these observations are also subject to signals introduced by magnetic active regions on host stars. Here we outline scientific opportunities in the next decade for…
The intuition suggested by the Drake equation implies that technology should be less prevalent than biology in the galaxy. However, it has been appreciated for decades in the SETI community that technosignatures could be more abundant,…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
We have conducted a search for artificial radio emission associated with the Kepler-160 system following the report of the discovery of the Earth-like planet candidate KOI-456.04 on 2020 June 4 (arXiv:1905.09038v2). Our search targeted both…
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…
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…
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is performing a homogeneous survey of the sky from space in search of transiting exoplanets. The collected data are also being used for detecting passing Solar system objects, including 17…
The ongoing optical time-domain astronomy surveys are routinely reporting fifty transient candidates per night. Here, I investigate the demographics of astronomical transients and supernova classifications reported to the Transient Name…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) is, historically, a search for aliens like us, inspired by human centric ideas of intelligence and technology. However, humans are not the only instance of an intelligent, communicating…