NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), a powerful radio telescope situated about 80.5 km (50 miles) west of Socorro, New Mexico, is joining the hunt for technosignatures from alien civilizations.
NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array is collecting data that astronomers will analyze for the type of emissions that only artificial transmitters make. Image credit: VLA / SETI.
VLA is one of the most productive radio telescopes in the world and consists of 27 antennas spread over 37 km (23 miles) of desert real estate.
Since 2017, it has been engaged in the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS), a radio reconnaissance of 80% of the sky.
But while these observations are being undertaken, a tap on the signal distribution network will shunt a copy of the data into a special receiver sporting very narrow channels.
Astronomers expect that any signals from a deliberately constructed transmitter will contain such narrow-band components, and their discovery would indicate that the signal is not produced by nature, but by an alien transmitter.
“VLA is the go-to instrument for radio astronomers, but this is the first time we are using it in a wide-ranging and continuous search for technosignatures,” said Dr. Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute.
The new processing system for SETI is dubbed the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster (COSMIC) and is spearheaded by the SETI Institute, in collaboration with NRAO and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.
“COSMIC operates commensally, which means it works in the background using a copy of the data astronomers are taking for other scientific purposes,” said Dr. Paul Demorest, scientist and group lead for VLA/VLBA science support at NRAO.
“This is an ideal and very efficient way to get large amounts of telescope time to search for rare signals.”
Unlike many previous SETI observations, a wide variety of transmissions, such as pulsed and transient signals, can be recognized by this new experiment.
The range of frequencies to be monitored is unprecedented, and the tally of star systems examined will be approximately ten million.
Since the beginning of 2023, signals from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft have been detected by the COSMIC system to verify the operation of the individual antennas in the array as well as combining their observations to produce a result that clearly shows the carrier and sidebands of the transmissions from the spacecraft.
“The detection of Voyager 1 is an exciting demonstration of the capabilities of the COSMIC system,” said Dr. Jack Hickish, founder of Real-Time Radio Systems Ltd.
“It is the culmination of an enormous amount of work from an international team of scientists and engineers.”
“The COSMIC system is a fantastic example of using modern general-purpose compute hardware to augment the capabilities of an existing telescope and serves as a testbed for technosignatures research on upcoming radio telescopes such as NRAO’s Next Generation VLA.”
