Breakthrough Listen to search for intelligent life around weird star
Source: Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media relations
Excerpt: Tabby’s star has provoked so much excitement over the past year,
with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilization capable of
building orbiting megastructures to capture the star’s energy, that UC
Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the
Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any signals from
intelligent extraterrestrials. ...“The Breakthrough Listen program has the most powerful SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] equipment
on the planet, and access to the largest telescopes on the planet,”
said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and
co-director of Breakthrough Listen. “We can look at it with greater
sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other
experiment in the world. ” ...“Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that
has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby’s star
has looked at it,” he said. “It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been
looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and
high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole
range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found.” While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star’s unique
behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can’t not take a
look. They’ve teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason
Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and
astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to
observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough
Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at
the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State
University....