Breakthrough Listen Extends SETI to the Southern Hemisphere with MeerKAT

Breakthrough Listen announced at the International Astronautical Congress the launch of a major new program with the MeerKAT telescope, in partnership with the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).

The MeerKAT survey of Breakthr Listen Listen will examine a million stars, or 1,000 times the number of targets in a previous search, in the quieter part of the radio spectrum, monitoring the signs of extraterrestrial technology. With the addition of MeerKAT's observations to its existing surveys, Listen will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with other surveys.

"The collaboration with MeerKAT will greatly enhance the capabilities of Breakthrough Listen," said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough initiatives. "It's now a truly global project."

Built and operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) and inaugurated in July 2018, MeerKAT is a powerful ensemble of 64 radio antennas located in the far-off Karoo Desert of South Africa. By collaborating with SARAO, Breakthrough Listen obtains access to one of the best means of observation in the world on radio waves.

The signals from the 64 satellite dishes (each 13.5 meters in diameter) are electronically combined to give an impressive combination of sky sensitivity, resolution and field of view. MeerKAT also serves as a precursor to Square Kilometer Array, which will expand and enhance existing facilities in the coming decades. It will cover one million square meters in South Africa and Australia to create by far the largest radio telescope in the world.

Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, said: "Listen and MeerKAT are developing next-generation technologies and techniques that will ultimately lead to research proposals with Square Kilometer Array, an exciting time for SETI and radio astronomy in general. . "

The implication of Breakthrough Listen adds the ability to search for technosignatures – signals that indicate the presence of technology on an extraterrestrial world and thus provide evidence that intelligent life exists elsewhere. MeerKAT was built with the goal of achieving a number of key scientific goals: studying distant galaxies, studying explosive events such as supernovae and mapping the distribution of gaseous hydrogen in the air. 39, primitive universe.

As in the other Listen radio research facilities, the new capabilities were made possible by the latest digital instrumentation set up by scientists and engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, SETI Research Center (BSRC). . Unlike the Green Bank and Parkes telescopes, the Breakthrough Listen team will rarely use MeerKAT as an exclusive observer.

Instead, the observations will be in a commensal mode – along with other astrophysics programs. With the aid of a sophisticated treatment, Breakthrough Listen scientists will direct the telescope to targets of interest. This means that MeerKAT's Breakthrough Listen instrument will work almost continuously, scanning the sky for signs of intelligent life.

"With this new instrument, we will be able to form multiple beams at the same time, obtaining high resolution data for multiple objects simultaneously," said Listen's Principal Investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion. "This complements and expands our capabilities on other telescopes, allowing us to analyze our cosmic neighborhood in search of technosignatures faster than ever."

Justin Jonas, Chief Technology Officer at SARAO, said: "We designed MeerKAT to be a flexible instrument that would provide standard interfaces to user-supplied equipment and would also allow commensal observation. It is very satisfying that these two design elements have contributed to the decisive listening, possible project, allowing a significant extension of the original functionality of MeerKAT. "

"Our new system is a small supercomputer," said Dr. Griffin Foster, Scientific Manager of the Breakthrough Listen project on MeerKAT. "The powerful Breakthrough Listen hardware will allow us to search for interesting signals in real time and save the relevant data products in our on-site data archives."

The MeerKAT telescope's Breakthrough Listen system will have a total input data rate of approximately 4 terabits per second (4,000 gigabits per second), about 40,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection.

Professor Michael Garrett, director of the Jodrell Bank Astrophysics Center (JBCA) in the United Kingdom (partner of Breakthrough Listen) and co-investigator of the Breakthrough MeerKAT program, said: "This development represents a radical change for the SETI research The use of a wide range of extremely sensitive radio telescopes, such as MeerKAT, is obvious because it offers many advantages over large single antenna surveys.The Breakthrough Listen MeerKAT project can be a powerful new tool for SETI with the potential to completely transform the field. "

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