The search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets a new home at Oxford

The University of Oxford has been selected as the new international headquarters for the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the world’s largest Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. SETI received a significant boost in 2015 with the launch of Breakthrough Listen, a $100-million-dollar private venture focusing on searching for technosignatures, signals from technologically advanced extraterrestrial species. The initiative previously had its headquarters at the University of California, Berkeley.

The new headquarters will take advantage of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a large array of radio dishes and antennas in South Africa and Australia. The SKA, which is expected to be operational by 2030, will transform radio astronomy with 50 times the sensitivity of other radio-telescope arrays and the ability to survey the sky 10,000 times faster. Oxford physicists have played a significant role in building hardware and writing software for the SKA, and will be able to tailor specific instrumentation for SETI.

Breakthrough Listen, like most SETI projects, focuses on searching for radio signals, but it also encompasses technosignatures in general. These are defined as evidence for the activity of technological extraterrestrial species, and SETI astronomers deliberately keep the definition open-ended to avoid human biases. The initiative also searches for possible “megastructures,” giant non-natural objects, in transits detected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and will place emphasis on the search for life on the nearest exoplanets.

All of these efforts will be aided by the development of new machine-learning algorithms that can analyze large amounts of data faster and in greater detail than traditional methods. Already, astronomers have used machine learning to detect eight possible SETI signals in data from the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia. Looking further ahead, proposals for a lunar far side radio telescope to be used for SETI will also be developed by scientists at Oxford. The far side of the moon is a radio-quiet area, shielded from all the radio frequency interference put out by human activity on Earth, meaning it can obtain an unprecedented sensitivity for listening for faint radio signals.