The search for alien technosignatures has dramatically expanded, thanks to a new experiment involving an alliance between the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
The new project is called COSMIC ("Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster") and is in operation at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in New Mexico. The VLA was featured in Robert Zemeckis' 1997 movie "Contact," starring Jodie Foster and based on Carl Sagan's famous novel of the same name.
COSMIC makes this possible and delivers a huge jump in coverage. Whereas previous SETI surveys have only been able to scrutinize a few thousand stars, COSMIC on the VLA will listen in on hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of star systems at frequencies between 0.75 and 50 GHz. It will enable a detailed SETI search of 80% of the entire sky (from declinations of -40 degrees to the zenith), which is orders of magnitude more in depth than all previous SETI searches combined.
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