COSMIC upgrade gives SETI orders of magnitude jump in sky coverage

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has just received a major upgrade. It can now scan hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) rather than just thousands of stars at a time. It will also enable SETI to search around 80% of the night's sky from declinations of 40 degrees to the zenith in its search for extraterrestrial "technosignatures." Nowhere to hide now aliens "Currently the focus is on creating one of the largest surveys for technological signals, with over 500,000 sources observed in the first six months," said COSMIC project scientist Chenoa Tremblay, an astronomer at the SETI Institute, in a .

COSMIC can scan cosmic radio sources at a rate of about 2,000 per hour. For reference, "technosignatures" refer to evidence or indicators of advanced technological use outside of our solar system that could indicate the existence of aliens. It can include radio signals, light or laser emissions, atmospheric chemical signatures, megastructures like Dyson spheres, etc.

, they tend to scan the sky for signatures that lie between 0.75 and 50 Gigahertz (GHz). This range of frequencies is chosen for several key reasons. The first is that frequencies below 0.75 GHz tend to be used by human technology for telecommunications and would thus create a lot of "noise." Other reasons include Earth's atmosphere's relative transparency to radio waves in this range.

It also includes microwave ranges that typically indicate the presence of neutral hydrogen (1.42 GHz) and the hydroxyl molecule (1.72 GHz), which can indicate the presence of water. The new , Breakthrough Listen, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is called COSMIC ("Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster").

It operates at the Karl G. Jansky of radio telescopes in New Mexico. The VLA is famous for its appearance in Robert Zemeckis' 1997 movie "Contact," which starred Jodie Foster and was based on Carl Sagan's novel of the same name. that COSMIC can use the VLA Sky Survey (VLASS) to its advantage.

VLASS started its third observing run in January 2023 and collected raw data using a 27 dish radio array. COSMIC receives a copy of the data before the VLA processes it, which allows SETI scientists to process the data in whatever manner they desire and in real time. The COSMIC system has also been designed with future upgrades in mind, ensuring it remains at the forefront of SETI experimentation.

One potential upgrade could be increasing the number of targets that can be observed simultaneously. Additionally, machine learning algorithms could be introduced to analyze the data even more efficiently. Tremblay, a researcher, says that the system's design is flexible and can be used for various scientific purposes, such as studying pulse structures of fast radio bursts and searching for candidates of axion dark matter.

Tremblay's team listened to a data downlink at 8.4GHz from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft to test the COSMIC system. The spacecraft is about 159 astronomical units (14.8 billion miles or 23.8 billion kilometers) away from Earth. Only a matter of time now The COSMIC project, the largest ever search for aliens, is now in full swing.

With the analysis of around half a million radio sources already in the database, details of the first six months of the project have been described in a new paper with lead author Tremblay. So, if aliens are out there, it is undoubtedly only a matter of time before we find some evidence. But we will have to see.

You can view the study for yourself in the journal.