Vishal Gajjar
October 15, 2020
Zoom Recording
Abstract:
The discovery of the ubiquity of habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, have ushered in a renaissance in the millennia-old quest to answer our most profound question about the Universe and our place within it – Are we alone? The recent discovery of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus has further suggested that life on Earth might not be unique. The Breakthrough Listen Initiative announced in July 2015 as a 10-year 100M USD program is the most comprehensive effort in history to quantify the distribution of advanced, technologically capable life in the universe. Our goal is to survey 1 million nearby stars, 100 nearby galaxies, the entire Galactic plane, and the Galactic center. To achieve this, we have deployed a 64-node GPU-equipped compute cluster at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and a 26-node compute cluster at the Parkes telescope in Australia. We are in the process of deploying a 128-node GPU-equipped and NVME SSD enabled compute cluster for real-time signal detection for commensal observations with the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. In this talk, I outline the status of the on-going observing campaign with these primary observing facilities, as well as planned activities with these instruments over the next few years. I will highlight some of the novel analysis techniques we are bringing to bear on multi-petabyte data sets, including machine learning tools we are deploying to search for a broader range of technosignatures than was previously possible.