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 question about the Universe and our place within it - Are we alone? The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, announced in July 2015 as a 10-year 100M USD program, is the most comprehensive effort in history to quantify the distribution of advanced, technologically capable life in the universe. In this white paper, we outline the status of the on-going observing campaign with our primary observing facilities, as well as planned activities with these instruments over the next few years. We also list collaborative facilities which will conduct searches for technosignatures in either primary observing mode, or commensally. We highlight some of the novel analysis techniques we are bringing to bear on multi-petabyte data sets, including machine learning tools we are deploying to search for a broader range of technosignatures than was previously possible.
@article{arxiv.1907.05519,
title = {The Breakthrough Listen Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence},
author = {Vishal Gajjar and Andrew Siemion and Steve Croft and Bryan Brzycki and Marta Burgay and Tobia Carozzi and Raimondo Concu and Daniel Czech and David DeBoer and Julia DeMarines and Jamie Drew and J. Emilio Enriquez and James Fawcett and Peter Gallagher and Michael Garrett and Nectaria Gizani and Greg Hellbourg and Jamie Holder and Howard Isaacson and Sanjay Kudale and Brian Lacki and Matthew Lebofsky and Di Li and David H. E. MacMahon and Joe McCauley and Andrea Melis and Emilio Molinari and Pearse Murphy and Delphine Perrodin and Maura Pilia and Danny C. Price and Claire Webb and Dan Werthimer and David Williams and Pete Worden and Philippe Zarka and Yunfan Gerry Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.05519},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey 2020, APC white paper, To be published in BAAS