Breakthrough Listen -- the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe -- has released its 11 events ranked highest for significance as well as summary data analysis results. It is considered unlikely that any of these signals originate from artificial extraterrestrial sources, but the search continues. Further, Listen has submitted for publication (available April 20) in a leading astrophysics journal the analysis of 692 stars, comprising all spectral types, observed during its first year of observations with the Green Bank Telescope.
Breakthrough Listen has so far acquired several petabytes of data using the Green Bank Radio Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, Lick Observatory's Automated Planet Finder on Mt. Hamilton in California, and the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. The Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley's SETI Research Center (BSRC) designed and built an analysis pipeline that scans through billions of radio channels in a search for unique signals that might indicate the presence of technology developed by civilizations outside our Solar System.
Initial results from deploying this pipeline on the first year of Breakthrough Listen data taken with the "L-band" receiver at GBT (covering frequencies from 1.1 -- 1.9 GHz) have been submitted for publication in one of the world's leading astronomy journals. Snapshot data has been released for the 11 highest ranked events that rose above the pipeline's threshold for significance, as well as summary results from the complete analysis. Data is available at breakthroughinitiatives.org/OpenDataSearch, and BSRC Director Andrew Siemion will be on Facebook Live presenting the results at 3:10pm PT this Thursday, April 20 at the Breakthrough Discuss conference.
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