The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Searching Boyajian's Star for Laser Line Emission

Lipman, David J.; Isaacson, Howard; Siemion, Andrew; Lebofsky, Matt; Price, Danny C.; MacMahon, David H. E.; Croft, Steve; DeBoer, David R.; Hickish, J.; Werthimer, Dan; Hellbourg, Greg; Enriquez, J. E.; Gizani, Nectaria

doi:10.1088/1538-3873/aafe86

Cited by 18 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…At optical wavelengths, the Automated Planet Finder telescope in California, USA, (Radovan et al 2014) is conducting a search for laser lines in highresolution spectra (e.g. Lipman et al 2019). BL is currently conducting a survey of several thousand nearby stars, 100 nearby galaxies, and the Galactic plane; fur- ther details may be found in Isaacson et al (2017).…”

Section: Breakthrough Listenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars Over 1.10–3.45 GHz

Price

Enriquez

Brzycki

et al. 2020

Self Cite

106

193

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Breakthrough Listen (BL) is a ten-year initiative to search for signatures of technologically capable life beyond Earth via radio and optical observations of the local Universe. A core part of the BL program is a comprehensive survey of 1702 nearby stars at radio wavelengths (1-10 GHz). Here, we report on observations with the 64-m CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, and the 100-m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, USA. Over 2016 January to 2019 March, a sample of 1138 stars was observed at Green Bank using the 1.10-1.90 GHz and 1.80-2.80 GHz receivers, and 189 stars were observed with Parkes over 2.60-3.45 GHz. We searched these data for the presence of engineered signals with Doppler-acceleration drift rates between ±4 Hz s −1 . Here, we detail our data analysis techniques and provide examples of detected events. After excluding events with characteristics consistent with terrestrial radio interference, we are left with zero candidates. That is, we find no evidence of putative radio transmitters above 2.1×10 12 W, and 9.1×10 12 W for Green Bank and Parkes observations, respectively. These observations constitute the most comprehensive search over 1.10-3.45 GHz for technosignatures to date. All data products, totalling ∼219 TB, are available for download as part of the first BL data release (DR1), as described in a companion paper (Lebofsky et. al., 2019)

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Section: Breakthrough Listenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars Over 1.10–3.45 GHz

Price

Enriquez

Brzycki

et al. 2020

Self Cite

106

193

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“…For example, when the interstellar object 'Oumuamua passed through the solar system, BL conducted dedicated observations of it using the GBT (Enriquez et al 2018). Another example is BL's campaign to observe Boyajian's Star for optical laser line emission, using the Automated Planet Finder at the Lick Observatory (Lipman et al 2019).…”

Section: Earth Transit Zone Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The primary star survey was revisited by Wlodarczyk-Sroka et al (2020) showing that the first few analyses of Breakthrough Listen (BL) radio data have surveyed many background stars in addition to the targeted nearby stars. An optical survey of the nearby star sample with the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory gives BL a reach beyond the radio enabling SETI searches in high resolution optical spectroscopy (Isaacson et al 2019;Lipman et al 2019). As the fields of astronomy and machine learning become more intertwined, enhanced searches for narrowband radio signals (Brzycki et al 2020) will add to those utilizing machine learning to search for fast radio bursts (Zhang et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Maire et al (2019) conducted a search for nanosecond-scale transients, observing 1280 objects from 950 − 1650 nm with sensitivity to optical pulses shorter than 50 ns. Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852), with its anomalous optical dimmings, has been the target of optical SETI searches (Lipman et al 2019) and has been observed in the radio spectrum by the ATA (Schuetz et al 2016). Infrared searches have been conducted using WISE data to investigate the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations with large energy supplies (Griffith et al 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: MeerKAT Target Selection

Czech,

Isaacson,

Pearce

et al. 2021

Preprint

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New radio telescope arrays offer unique opportunities for large-scale commensal SETI surveys. Ethernet-based architectures are allowing multiple users to access telescope data simultaneously by means of multicast Ethernet subscriptions. Breakthrough Listen will take advantage of this by conducting a commensal SETI survey on the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. By subscribing to raw voltage data streams, Breakthrough Listen will be able to beamform commensally anywhere within the field of view during primary science observations. The survey will be conducted with unprecedented speed by forming and processing 64 coherent beams simultaneously, allowing the observation of several million objects within a few years. Both coherent and incoherent observing modes are planned. We present the list of desired sources for observation and explain how these sources were selected from the Gaia DR2 catalog. Given observations planned by MeerKAT's primary telescope users, we discuss their effects on the commensal survey and propose a commensal observing strategy in response. Finally, we outline our proposed approach towards observing one million nearby stars and analyse expected observing progress in the coming years.

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“…A raw 2D echelle spectrum (figure fromLipman et al 2019) of Boyajian's Star, 4,608 pixels in the dispersion direction and 2,080 pixels in the spatial direction, containing 79 spectral orders. The zoomed image in the upper-right corner is a segment of one of these spectral orders, which shows a cosmic ray in the bottom right corner.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction, and Archiving

Lebofsky

Croft

Siemion

et al. 2019

PASP

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Breakthrough Listen is the most comprehensive and sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to date, employing a collection of international observational facilities including both radio and optical telescopes. During the first three years of the Listen program, thousands of targets have been observed with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), Parkes Telescope and Automated Planet Finder. At GBT and Parkes, observations have been performed ranging from 700 MHz to 26 GHz, with raw data volumes averaging over 1 PB / day. A pseudo-real time software spectroscopy suite is used to produce multi-resolution spectrograms amounting to approximately 400 GB h −1 GHz −1 beam −1 . For certain targets, raw baseband voltage data is also preserved. Observations with the Automated Planet Finder produce both 2-dimensional and 1-dimensional high resolution (R ∼ 10 5 ) echelle spectral data.Although the primary purpose of Listen data acquisition is for SETI, a range of secondary science has also been performed with these data, including studies of fast radio bursts. Other current and potential research topics include spectral line studies, searches for certain kinds of dark matter, probes of interstellar scattering, pulsar searches, radio transient searches and investigations of stellar activity. Listen data are also being used in the development of algorithms, including machine learning approaches to modulation scheme classification and outlier detection, that have wide applicability not just for astronomical research but for a broad range of science and engineering.In this paper, we describe the hardware and software pipeline used for collection, reduction, archival, and public dissemination of Listen data. We describe the data formats and tools, and present Breakthrough Listen Data Release 1.0 (BLDR 1.0), a defined set of publicly-available raw and reduced data totalling 1 PB.

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The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Searching Boyajian's Star for Laser Line Emission

Cited by 18 publications

References 14 publications

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars Over 1.10–3.45 GHz

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars Over 1.10–3.45 GHz

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: MeerKAT Target Selection

The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction, and Archiving

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