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This story is from July 17, 2019

Breakthrough Listen launches new search for optical technosignatures

Breakthrough Listen launches new search for optical technosignatures
BENGALURU: Breakthrough Listen – a multi-billion dollar initiative looking to find signs of intelligent life in the universe – on Wednesday announced a new collaboration with the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) Collaboration, which is in the search for technosignatures, signs of technology developed by intelligent life beyond Earth.
In a statement shared with TOI, Breakthrough Listen said: “Joining Listen’s ongoing radio frequency survey and spectroscopic optical laser survey, VERITAS will search for pulsed optical beacons with its array of four 12-meter telescopes at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.”
VERITAS is the world’s most powerful telescope array for studying high energy astrophysics with gamma rays.
It detects gamma rays coming from space by looking for the extremely brief flashes of blue “Cherenkov” light they create when they hit the top of Earth’s atmosphere.
VERITAS will look for pulsed optical beacons with durations as short as several nanoseconds. Over such timescales, artificial beacons could easily outshine any stars that lie in the same direction on the sky.
“The use of all four telescopes simultaneously allows for very effective discrimination against false positive detections. The VERITAS Collaboration has previously published observations of the mysteriously dimming Boyajian’s Star in search of such optical pulses,” the statement reads.
The new programme of VERITAS observations will provide complementary searches for optical pulse signatures of many more stars from the primary Breakthrough Listen star list.

“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said, adding: “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”
Breakthrough Listen’s search for optical technosignatures with VERITAS will be led by Prof David Williams of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics and Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Prof Jamie Holder of the Department of Physics and the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, in collaboration with the Listen team at the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center (BSRC), led by Andrew Siemion.
Siemion, while exuding confidence about the new tie-up, said: “Optical communication has already been used by Nasa to transmit high definition images to Earth from the Moon, so there’s reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.”
Holder said that using the huge mirror area of the four VERITAS telescopes will allow Listen to search for extremely faint optical flashes in the night sky, “which could correspond to signals from an extraterrestrial civilization”.
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