“A cost-efficient overhaul of the 50-year-old Molonglo radio telescope will equip it as a standalone fast radio burst detector and localizer, explain Adam Deller and Chris Flynn.”

FRBs are enigmatic radio signals that are incredibly bright and incredibly short lived. They last only for a few milliseconds, but can release more energy in their short life than the Sun does over an entire decade. Figuring out exactly what is causing them is an exciting and vibrant field in modern astronomy.

Capturing richer data on FRBs will be the key to unlocking their secrets. Breakthrough Listen data on FRB 180301 revealed intriguing polarization and frequency structure, which does not fit the typical model for an FRB. We ran a set of verification tests, to check if it could be interference from satellites, and while we can’t say for sure, it looks unlikely. There have been suggestions that FRBs could be due to alien spacecraft, but as more and more FRBs are detected, this hypothesis looks shaky. Our conclusion is that this FRB is a real astrophysical event, that occured a few billion years ago in a galaxy, far far away.

Many of the more recently discovered FRBs by the UTMOST, ASKAP and CHIME telescopes also show frequency structure, but these telescopes are yet to publish any polarization results (but results are likely coming soon). The peculiar properties of FRB 180301 may turn out to be a critical piece of the FRB puzzle.

Background image: a spectrogram (signal amplitude over time and frequency) of FRB 180301; full details can be found in the arXiv paper.

Further details can be found in our press release, and supporting materials can be found at seti.berkeley.edu/listen2019.

BZ509 dances around the Sun in a remarkable retrograde (backward) orbit, stabilized by perfectly-timed close encounters with Jupiter’s regular orbit (a ‘resonance’). A leading explanation for BZ509’s unusual orbit is that it came from outside the Solar system and got trapped by the Sun’s gravitational pull.

If this theory is correct, then like ‘Oumuamua, BZ509 is an interstellar visitor to our neighbourhood. Recently, Amir Siraj & Avi Loeb sifted through the trajectories of known asteroids, and found eight asteroids that they believe could be of interstellar origin.

The potential interstellar origin of objects such as BZ509 makes them interesting targets for SETI searches: several authors have postulated that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization could send probes or beacons to other star systems. Indeed, we took a close look at ‘Oumuamua with the Green Bank Telesope, but didn’t find anything unusual.

As detailed in our recently published Research Note, we searched BZ509 for narrowband transmissions, but didn’t identify any signals above our sensitivity limit of 4.8 W (a radiated power level between that of a cell phone, and the telemetry link of a NASA space probe like New Horizons). But with a new bounty of interstellar asteroids, it’s just the beginning for targeted SETI searches of these kinds of objects.

Image Credit: Large Binocular Telescope Observatory

The Breakthrough-Parkes data recorder digitises signals from the radio telescope and distributes the data across a cluster of high-performance computers. The system uses digital signal processing boards designed for radio astronomy by the CASPER collaboration, which outputs digitized data over high-speed Ethernet. The digitized data–more than 128 Gb/s–are then recorded to disk across 26 compute servers. We use graphics processing units (NVIDIA GTX 1080) to convert these data into products that can be searched for artificial signals that may indicate the presence of advanced life beyond Earth.

We are also opening up our digital recorder to other astronomers, so they can take advantage of the unique capabilities of our system. Applications for shared-risk observations with the Breakthrough-Parkes data recorder can now be made via the ATNF observing proposal portal, and some extra info is available here.

Further technical details may be found in the paper. A freely-available preprint can be downloaded from arXiv.

The DWF program was conceived to find transient phenomena like supernova, fast radio bursts (FRBs), and stellar flares, by pointing many different telescopes at the same patch of sky. If there’s a bang, all the telescopes will see it, giving us a wealth of data. This should help solve some of the unsolved mysteries of the transient Universe.

The DWF program is also an exciting opportunity for SETI searches, because of the wealth of data and also because they are observing galaxy clusters. One of the targets, the Antlia cluster, contains about 234 galaxies: that’s trillions of stars and trillions of potentially habitable worlds.

Breakthrough Listen will be running DWF co-observations with Parkes Thursday UTC 23:00-01:00 and Friday UTC 23:00-02:00. We will be joined by the Dark Energy Camera in Chile (optical), the HXMT X-ray satellite, the GROND and REM infrared telescopes, Pierre Auger high-energy telescope, and the Molonglo radio telescope, among others. If an interesting event is detected, other telescopes, such as the VLT in Chile and SALT telescope in South Africa will be triggered.

With so many telescopes, we have a fantastic chance of finding interesting astrophysical events, and there will be a wonderful dataset to mine for unusual signals that may indicate technologically-capable life.

Background image credit: The Antlia Cluster of Galaxies, Rolf Olsen

In the show, Alan Duffy and I observed the pulsar Vela (J0835-4559) and the exoplanet Wolf 1061 c with the Parkes radio telescope. These were not ordinary Breakthrough Listen observations though: the signal from the telescope was converted into audio so we could literally listen to signals from space in real time.

While this was super cool to do live on TV, we do wish to add a point of clarification: Parkes, like all radio telescopes, picks up radio waves, not sound waves. For the show, we took the radio signal and converted into an audio signal, so the viewers at home could listen in! This is a fun thing to do, and an interesting way to explore your data, but it is certainly not the only analysis that SETI researchers do.

To give more detail, the curved surface of a radio telescope (the ‘dish’) reflects and focuses electromagnetic waves from space into a what is known as the ‘receiver’. The receiver converts the incoming waves into voltages that can travel down on a coaxial cable. The output of the receiver can be connected to different signal analyzers, such as a power meter, a spectrum analyzer, or indeed, a computer soundcard and a set of headphones.

Listening to radio waves is a lot of fun, but it is sadly not the optimal way to analyze radio signals. Firstly, it’s hard to hear a weak signal hiding beneath noise, and also hard to tell if a signal is radio interference or not by listening alone. Secondly, it’s slow. The human ear is sensitive beween about 20 Hz to 20 kHz — less than 20 kHz of bandwidth. By comparison, the Breakthrough Listen systems can process as much as 10 GHz of bandwidth: that’s 500,000 times what our ears can handle! A 5-minute observation over a 10 GHz frequency range, if converted into sound, would take close to 5 years to listen to. So we aren’t yet done listening to exoplanet Wolf 1061 c; there are plenty of frequencies left unexplored.

Because we don’t have 500,000 years to analyze our data, we, and other radio astronomers, use computers to search through the vast amount of data that streams out of a telescope. One exciting field of research for signal classification is machine learning, where computer algorithms can be ‘taught’ to find interesting signals in data, or even ‘learn’ by themselves. So it could very well be that the first signs of intelligent life beyond Earth are not found by us per se, but are found by artificial intelligence of our own creation.

During our observations at the Parkes radio telescope yesterday, we detected a mysterious and fleeting phenomena known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRBs). As we did when we caught the only FRB known to repeat, FRB 121102, in the act, we’ve written up initial details in an Astronomer’s Telegram to encourage follow-up observations with other facilities, and will look at the data in more details in the coming weeks.

While astronomers don’t know all that much about FRBs–only tens of bursts have ever been detected–we can infer some intriguing details about them. Firstly, they exhibit a tell-tale sweep in frequency that suggests they are incredibly far away: billions of light years. FRBs travel billions of years to get to us, and only last a few milliseconds, suggesting the emission mechanism is short-lived. For us to detect them clearly after such a long journey, they have also to be insanely bright.

What can produce such bursts? We don’t know yet, but leading theories involve neutron stars and cataclysmic events. There’s also a neat theory that they are due to interstellar extraterrestrial travel. We’d love that to be the case, but have to rule out all plausible astrophysical theories first!

Our observations should help solve the mystery of FRBs. The Breakthrough Listen digital systems recorded the raw voltages from this new FRB, which will let us look at the burst in finer detail than has been done in the past.

If you’d like to access the data from these observations (along with instructions for reading the technical “filterbank” format), they are available here.