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Post by swamprat on Feb 16, 2020 1:15:03 GMT
Astronomers to sweep entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life
Project is collaboration between privately-funded firm and New Mexico observatory
Hannah Devlin, Science correspondent
Fri 14 Feb 2020
The Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico will gather data to be analysed by the Seti Institute. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty
Astronomers will sweep the entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life for the first time, using 28 giant radio telescopes in an unprecedented hunt for alien civilisations.
The project is a collaboration between the privately-funded Seti Institute and the Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico, one of the world’s most powerful radio observatories. Gaining real-time access to all the data gathered by VLA is considered a major coup for scientists hunting extraterrestrial lifeforms and an indication that the field has “gone mainstream”.
Normal astronomy operations will continue at the VLA, which was featured in the 1997 film Contact, but under the new arrangement all data will be duplicated and fed through a dedicated supercomputer that will search for beeps, squawks or other signatures of distant technology.
“The VLA is being used for an all-sky survey and we kind of go along for the ride,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Seti centre. “It allows us to in parallel conduct a Seti survey.
“Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and [our] telescopes can play a major role in answering it,” said Tony Beasley, director of The National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the VLA.
The first phase of the project, installing new cables, has been funded by John Giannandrea, a senior Apple executive and trustee of the Seti Institute, and Carol Giannandrea.
The VLA project is one of a wave of upcoming Seti initiatives sketched out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Seattle on Friday.
Jill Tarter, an emeritus researcher at the Seti Institute, gave updates on Panoseti, a proposed observatory in the prototype stage of development designed to continuously watch a large portion of the sky. If funding is secured, Panoseti will comprise two geodesic domes covered in half-metre lenses, giving it the appearance of a giant pair of insect eyes. The ability to simultaneously watch a vast expanse of sky would make it uniquely suited to spotting transient signals, such as the flash of a distant powerful laser. “To catch that kind of thing you really do want to be looking when the signal comes your way,” said Tarter ahead of her talk.
The veteran Seti scientist said the field had been boosted in the past decade by the discovery that about a fifth of stars host planets in the “habitable zone”.
“Now that there might be more habitable real estate out there than we ever imagined early on … it seems to make this next question about intelligent life more realistic,” she said. “It’s not as far on the fringes as it once was – it’s almost mainstream.”
Others are hunting for less intelligent varieties of alien life. Speaking at the same session at AAAS, Victoria Meadows, who leads Nasa’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington, described observations planned with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year.
Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a cool, dim star called Trappist-1 in the constellation of Aquarius will be high up on the hit list. Computer models suggest the Trappist-1 system is among the most promising for finding planets with atmospheres and temperatures that would enable liquid water to exist on the surface.
“The James Webb Telescope will be able to tell us whether they have atmospheres like the Earth or Venus,” said Meadows. “It gives us our first real chance to search for gases given off by life on another planet. We’re basically going to get to study Earth’s cousins.”
Siemion also announced the second tranche of results from the $100m (£76m) Breakthrough Listen Initiative: no alien transmissions have been detected so far.
The latest survey, the most comprehensive to date of radio emissions, included the first search of the “Earth transit zone”. The transit zone search targeted 20 stars in positions where the hypothetical inhabitants of these solar systems would be able to observe the Earth’s shadow flickering across the sun. This method of detection has allowed astronomers to identify thousands of exoplanets and determine whether their conditions are potentially habitable.
“This turns that around and says, ‘What if some other civilisation were watching our sun?’” said Siemion.
If there is, it is either watching quietly or watching from some of the other 200bn stars in the Milky Way.
As the latest technology advances bring scientists a step closer to answering the question of whether anyone or anything is out there, there are still issues to be ironed out over best practice in the event that an alien civilisation is detected.
Stephen Hawking warned against attempting any form of contact, suggesting the outcome for humans would not necessarily be good. Siemion disagrees. “Personally I think we absolutely should and I think without a doubt, we would,” he said. “Part of being human is wanting to reach out into the unknown and wanting to reach out and make connections.”
He is less decisive about what Earth’s message should be, however. “I don’t know … I spend absolutely zero time thinking about that,” he said. “I guess I would just say, ‘Hello’.”
www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/15/astronomers-to-sweep-entire-sky-for-signs-of-extraterrestrial-life
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Post by HAL on Feb 16, 2020 20:04:05 GMT
Alhtough I have a great interest in all things scientific, and greatly admire the folks who do all these clever things and create these marvelous technologies, I do sometimes wonder 'why'when it comes to these huge astronomical projects.
I mean, if they do find some possible life form many light years away, What are they going to do with the information anyway ?
How will it actually benefit us ?
HAL.
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Post by swamprat on Feb 18, 2020 0:43:04 GMT
New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life
by Staff Writers,
Charlottesville, VA (SPX)
Feb. 17, 2020
Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.
New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.
"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.
"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.
Siemion highlighted the singular role the $100-million Breakthrough Listen Initiative has played in reinvigorating the field of SETI in recent years. Siemion also announced the latest scientific results from Listen, a SETI survey in the direction of stars where a distant civilization could observe the Earth's passage across the sun, and the availability of nearly 2 PetaBytes of data from the Listen Initiative's international network of observatories.
Other indicators of possible technologies include laser beams, structures built around stars to capture the star's power output, atmospheric chemicals produced by industries, and rings of satellites similar to the ring of geosynchronous communication satellites orbiting above Earth's equator.
"Such indicators are becoming detectable as our technology advances, and this has renewed interest in SETI searches at both government agencies and private foundations," Siemion said.
Life forms, whether intelligent or not, also can produce detectable indicators. These include the presence of large amounts of oxygen, smaller amounts of methane, and a variety of other chemicals. Victoria Meadows, Principal Investigator for NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington, described how scientists are developing computer models to simulate extraterrestrial environments and to help support future searches for habitable planets and life beyond the Solar System.
"Upcoming telescopes in space and on the ground will have the capability to observe the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby cool stars, so it's important to understand how best to recognize signs of habitability and life on these planets," Meadows said, "These computer models will help us determine whether an observed planet is more or less likely to support life."
As new programs implement the expanding technical capabilities for detecting extraterrestrial life and intelligence, it's important to define what constitutes compelling, credible evidence, according to Jill Tarter, of the SETI Institute.
"How strong does the evidence need to be to justify claiming a discovery? Can we expect to find smoking guns? If the evidence requires many caveats, how do we responsibly inform the public," Tarter asked.
Tarter pointed out that projects such as the University of California at San Diego's PANOSETI visible-light and infrared search, and the SETI Institute's Laser SETI search are being built with co-observing sites to reduce false positives. Such measures, she said, will boost confidence in reported detections, but also add to the expense of the project.
The news media also share responsibility for communicating accurately with the public, Tarter emphasized. She cited cases in recent years of "exuberant reporting" of bogus claims of SETI detections. "A real detection of extraterrestrial intelligence would be such an important milestone in our understanding of the Universe that journalists need to avoid uncritical reporting of obviously fake claims," she said.
"As continuing discoveries show us that planets are very common components of the Universe, and we are able to study the characteristics of those planets, it's exciting that at the same time, technological advances are giving us the tools to greatly expand our search for signs of life. We look forward to this new realm of discovery," said Beasley, who organized the AAAS panel.
"We also look forward to the coming decade, when we hope to build a next-generation Very Large Array, which will be able to search a volume of the Universe a thousand times larger than that accessible to current telescopes - making it the most powerful radio technosignature search machine humanity has ever constructed," Beasley added.
www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_technologies_strategies_expanding_search_for_extraterrestrial_life_999.html
And,,,,, for another point of view.....
Why the hunt for alien life is pointless
Letters
Mon 17 Feb 2020
David Robson thinks the time it will take to make contact presents a problem. John Boyd questions the purpose of finding extraterrestrial life when we can’t respect life on our own planet.
‘We hunt down, farm and kill life that exists around us. Why do we want to find more life forms?’ John Boyd asks. Photograph: Getty
While reading your report (Is anybody out there? Biggest hunt ever to begin for alien life, 15 February) I wondered why scientists are trying to persuade people to believe there is any point in contacting life on other planets. A five-minute online investigation tells me that the fastest object available would take 159,000 years to reach Trappist-1 (the most likely place to find life according to the article). Sending a signal would be quicker – about 40 years. It seems likely there is life out there, but, sadly, trying to make contact is pointless.
David Robson
London
I question the purpose of finding extraterrestrial life when we clearly do not respect the life of creatures on our own planet. We hunt down, farm and kill life that exists around us. Why do we want to find more life forms?
John Boyd
Chorley, Lancashire
www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/17/why-the-hunt-for-alien-life-is-pointless
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Post by swamprat on Apr 14, 2020 14:59:18 GMT
Will SETI 2.0 lead to a discovery of intelligent aliens?
Posted by Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | April 14, 2020
2020 has been an exciting year so far for SETI – the search for extraterrestrial life – in terms of new technological developments and strategies.
Artist’s concept of a nearby civilization signaling Earth after observing an Earth transit in front of our sun. Scientists have looked for radio signals from at least 20 nearby stars, those situated so that they might see Earth transits. So far, no signal has been found. And so the search continues. Image via UC Berkeley/ Breakthrough Listen.
2020 has been an interesting year so far with respect to the search for extraterrestrial entelligence, aka SETI. No, there’s been no alien signal yet, but scientists have been working with new technologies and strategies that should greatly improve the search. Earlier this year, they also announced that they have a ton of new survey data to go through, collected in previous years by radio telescopes.
An outline for new approaches to the question of alien intelligence, and how best to look for it, was announced by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in mid-February 2020. The old SETI paradigm of only searching for radio signals is now changing as new technology is used and new ideas are considered.
Also in mid-February, the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced via UC Berkeley that a whopping 2 petabytes (2 million gigabytes) of data was released from the latest SETI survey of our galaxy. It is the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the galaxy and the region around the central black hole. The associated peer-reviewed paper can be found on arXiv.
When SETI first started in the 1960s with Project Ozma, its only focus was to look for radio signals from an advanced alien civilization among the stars. SETI still does that, but a lot has also changed since then. Now, as well as searching for radio signals, scientists are looking for technosignatures, a wide variety of possible signs of alien intelligence including chemical changes in a planet’s atmosphere, laser pulses and even megastructures orbiting a planet or star.
As part of the new technological advancements, the SETI Institute will add a new signal-processing system to the Very Large Array. Image via Bill Saxton/ NRAO/ AUI/ NSF.
This year, some radio telescopes that are already looking for radio signals are having new SETI capabilities added to them with a new signal-processing system. This is the result of an agreement between NRAO and the SETI Institute. The National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is the first to use this technology, with the addition of a state-of-the-art technosignature search system. NRAO director Tony Beasley said in February, in a statement:
"Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it."
Andrew Siemion is director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, and he’s principal investigator for the Breakthrough Listen initiative. He explained:
"The SETI Institute [is developing and installing] an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky. This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search."
Such an endeavor is welcome news for those who have advocated that SETI needs to expand its search away from looking only for radio signals, given that a civilization older and more advanced than ours might have abandoned the use of radio signals long ago.
With the new technologies, scientists say they’ll be able to look for other signs of intelligent activity, such as lasers, megastructures like Dyson spheres that could be built around a star to harness its energy, chemicals in the atmosphere of a planet caused by industrial pollution, or rings of artificial satellites orbiting a planet. All this can be done while the telescope is also doing other kinds of observations, they say. Siemion explained:
"Such indicators are becoming detectable as our technology advances, and this has renewed interest in SETI searches at both government agencies and private foundations."
The data from the VLA’s new observations is being provided to a new signal-processing system built by the SETI Institute. This will allow VLA to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence while doing other kinds of observations at the same time. Image via Bill Saxton/ NRAO/ AUI/ NSF.
SETI traditionally involved the search for alien civilizations. But there’s more to discover here. For example, simple life forms might also alter a planet’s atmosphere in ways that could be detected; for example, they might produce oxygen and methane. According to Victoria Meadows, principal investigator for NASA’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL):
"Upcoming telescopes in space and on the ground will have the capability to observe the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby cool stars, so it’s important to understand how best to recognize signs of habitability and life on these planets. These computer models will help us determine whether an observed planet is more or less likely to support life."
Of course, it would be exciting to find any kind of extraterrestrial life on an exoplanet orbiting a distant star. And now scientists have new and better tools to find it. But if alien life were found sometime relatively soon, then what? Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute has said:
"How strong does the evidence need to be to justify claiming a discovery? Can we expect to find smoking guns? If the evidence requires many caveats, how do we responsibly inform the public?"
Tarter also emphasized the need for media to accurately relay the discovery to the public:
"A real detection of extraterrestrial intelligence would be such an important milestone in our understanding of the universe that journalists need to avoid uncritical reporting of obviously fake claims."
Beasley spoke to a new era for SETI as well when he said:
"As continuing discoveries show us that planets are very common components of the universe, and we are able to study the characteristics of those planets, it’s exciting that at the same time, technological advances are giving us the tools to greatly expand our search for signs of life. We look forward to this new realm of discovery.
We also look forward to the coming decade, when we hope to build a next-generation Very Large Array, which will be able to search a volume of the universe a thousand times larger than that accessible to current telescopes, making it the most powerful radio technosignature search machine humanity has ever constructed."
In the meantime, as we wait for that big discovery – as we’ve waited hopefully for a lifetime – Breakthrough Listen also said in February that nearly 2 petabytes of data had been released from the most comprehensive survey to date of radio emissions from the plane of our galaxy and the region surrounding the central black hole.
It was the second data dump from the project’s four-year search. The first data release was in June 2019. The survey covered the radio spectrum between 1 and 12 gigahertz. Half the data is from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, and the other half is from the Green Bank Telescope, part of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, and an optical telescope called the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California.
Matt Lebofsky, Breakthrough Listen’s lead system administrator, said in February in a statement:
"Since Breakthrough Listen’s initial data release last year, we have doubled what is available to the public. It is our hope that these data sets will reveal something new and interesting, be it other intelligent life in the universe or an as-yet-undiscovered natural astronomical phenomenon."
Yuri Milner, the founder of Breakthrough Listen, also emphasized the importance of having much more data to work with:
"For the whole of human history, we had a limited amount of data to search for life beyond Earth. So, all we could do was speculate. Now, as we are getting a lot of data, we can do real science and, with making this data available to the general public, so can anyone who wants to know the answer to this deep question."
Breakthrough Listen is using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes telescope in Australia for the most comprehensive search for alien radio signals yet conducted. Image via Breakthrough Listen/ UC Berkeley.
The center of our Milky Way galaxy – and our galaxy’s flat disk – are considered good places to search for evidence of advanced alien life, since they are so dense with stars. It makes sense that we’d find a powerful transmitter or beacon in the galactic center or disk. According to Siemion:
"The galactic center is the subject of a very specific and concerted campaign with all of our facilities because we are in unanimous agreement that that region is the most interesting part of the Milky Way galaxy. If an advanced civilization anywhere in the Milky Way wanted to put a beacon somewhere, getting back to the Schelling point idea, the galactic center would be a good place to do it. It is extraordinarily energetic, so one could imagine that if an advanced civilization wanted to harness a lot of energy, they might somehow use the supermassive black hole that is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy."
Now that’s a mind-blowing idea!
These scientists said earlier this year that a small subset of the new data had already been analyzed, from 20 nearby stars in the Earth-transit zone, that is, the zone in our sky aligned with the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Distant planets in this part of our sky would see Earth transiting the sun, if they had powerful-enough technologies, and if they happened to be looking our way.
The search of 20 stars in the Earth-transit zone was conducted in the C-band – 4 to 8 gigahertz – by the Green Bank Telescope. Sofia Sheikh, a UC Berkeley undergraduate, conducted the analysis and submitted her findings to The Astrophysical Journal (here’s a draft on arXiv):
"This is a unique geometry. It is how we discovered other exoplanets, so it kind of makes sense to extrapolate and say that that might be how other intelligent species find planets, as well. This region has been talked about before, but there has never been a targeted search of that region of the sky."
So what did Sheikh find? Nothing yet, but this new comprehensive search is still in the very early stages. Siemion said:
"We didn’t find any aliens, but we are setting very rigorous limits on the presence of a technologically capable species, with data for the first time in the part of the radio spectrum between 4 and 8 gigahertz. These results put another rung on the ladder for the next person who comes along and wants to improve on the experiment."
Sheikh added:
"My search was sensitive enough to see a transmitter basically the same as the strongest transmitters we have on Earth, because I looked at nearby targets on purpose. So, we know that there isn’t anything as strong as our Arecibo telescope beaming something at us. Even though this is a very small project, we are starting to get at new frequencies and new areas of the sky."
As noted in the paper:
"We conclude that at least 8% of the systems in the restricted earth transit zone within 150 pc [parsecs] do not possess the type of transmitters searched in this survey."
The Green Bank Telescope was aimed toward each star for five minutes, then was turned away from each star for five minutes. That process was repeated two more times. If a detected signal disappears when the telescope is turned away, that makes it more likely that it really is originating from the star and isn’t just terrestrial interference. An initial 1 million radio spikes were narrowed down to a couple of hundred good candidates, which were then eliminated as Earth-based interference. The last four signals turned out to be from passing satellites. Disappointing, but there is still a long way to go.
While searches like this cover a lot of cosmic territory, it should be kept in mind that we have still really only looked at a very tiny portion of even just our own galaxy. As Jason Wright at Penn State put it, if our oceans were an analogy to all the places and radio wavelengths that could be searched, then to date we have only explored the equivalent to a hot tub. That leaves a lot of cosmic real estate still to cover. According to Siemion:
"Of all the observations we have done, probably 20% or 30% have been included in a data analysis paper. Our goal is not just to analyze it 100%, but 1000% or 2000%. We want to analyze it iteratively."
It’s not just distant stars that Breakthrough Listen can monitor. The project recently listened to interstellar comet 2I/Borisov as well as the previous interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua in our solar system, just in case. Nothing was heard, which isn’t too surprising, but since we don’t really know when or how a distant civilization might send a probe our way, it doesn’t hurt to check them out. As Steve Croft, a research astronomer with the Berkeley SETI Research Center and Breakthrough Listen, explained:
"If interstellar travel is possible, which we don’t know, and if other civilizations are out there, which we don’t know, and if they are motivated to build an interstellar probe, then some fraction greater than zero of the objects that are out there are artificial interstellar devices. Just as we do with our measurements of transmitters on extrasolar planets, we want to put a limit on what that number is."
With new technology, strategies and mountains of data to analyze, these are good days for SETI. Broadening the search for alien intelligence, or other life, is a smart move, and one of these days it might just pay off in spades.
Bottom line: 2020 has been an exciting year so far in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aka SETI, with some technological developments and new strategies.
earthsky.org/space/seti-breakthrough-listen-new-technologies-and-strategies
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Post by nyx on Apr 14, 2020 17:08:36 GMT
After all is said and done, how do you explain the world coverage of the Phoenix Lights.
They are already here and control the situation.
SETI is a waste of time.
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Post by nyx on Apr 14, 2020 17:24:52 GMT
As a side note, actor Kurt Russell was flying his plane next to the Phoenix Lights and report this as a UFO to the tower.
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