New Ways To Receive and Scan For Communications from Space?

[ExomatrixTV]

New Ways To Receive Communications from Space?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bIGqstMmlV4

SETI: New Signal Excites Alien Hunters—Here’s How We Could Find Out if It’s Real

The $100 million Breakthrough Listen Initiative, founded by Russian billionaire, technology and science investor Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, has identified a mysterious radio signal that seems to come from the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri. This has generated a flood of excitement in the press and among scientists themselves. The discovery, which was reported by the Guardian but has yet to be published in a scientific journal, may be the search for extraterrestrial intelligence’s (SETI) first bona fide candidate signal. It has been dubbed Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 or simply BLC-1.

Although the Breakthrough Listen team are still working on the data, we know that the radio signal was detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia while it was pointing at Proxima Centauri, which is thought to be orbited by at least one habitable planet. The signal was present for the full observation, lasting several hours. It also was absent when the telescope pointed in a different direction.



Artist’s impression of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. ESO/M. Kornmesser/wikipedia, CC BY-SA The signal was “narrow-band,” meaning it only occupied a slim range of radio frequencies. And it drifted in frequency in a way that you would expect if it came from a moving planet. These characteristics are exactly the kind of attributes the SETI scientists have been looking for since the astronomer Frank Drake first began the pioneering initiative some 60 years ago.

While this represents remarkable progress in our pursuit of the ultimate question of whether we are alone in the universe, the BLC-1 signal also presents some food for thought on how we conduct these searches. In particular, BLC-1 highlights a problem that has dogged SETI research right from the beginning: disappearing signals. BLC-1 hasn’t been seen since it was first detected in the spring of 2019.

If BLC-1 finally emerges as a true SETI signal candidate, it will be the first since the “Wow! signal” recorded back in 1977. This is perhaps the most famous example of an inconclusive SETI candidate—it was never observed again. That doesn’t mean it cannot be extraterrestrial in nature. The perfect celestial alignment of moving and potentially rotating transmitters and receivers, separated by interstellar distances, is always likely to be a fortuitous and sometimes temporary circumstance.

Nevertheless, this represents a challenge for the Breakthrough Listen team. If BLC-1 is never seen to repeat, it will be very difficult to conduct the kind of detailed follow-up that will fully convince scientists that it was a message from aliens. Skeptics will rightly argue that this is more likely to be either a new form of human-generated radio interference or a rare feature of the complex observing instrumentation itself.
Indeed, it may never be possible to provide really compelling evidence of the extraterrestrial nature of a SETI event based on a telescope with a single dish, such as Parkes. This is especially the case for one-off events.

Ways Forward

One way forward would be to abandon the traditional approach of using large single dishes for SETI. While a parabolic dish has the useful property of being sensitive to a fairly large area of sky, if a candidate signal is detected, there is no way of knowing exactly where it came from. So, while the Parkes telescope was nominally pointing at Proxima Centauri, literally hundreds of thousands of other galactic stars were also present in the field of view. Ultimately, any one of them could potentially be the source of the BLC-1.

We can overcome this problem by observing with several large dishes simultaneously, preferably separated by hundreds and even thousands of kilometers. By combining their signals using a powerful technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, we can pinpoint the position of a signal with exquisite accuracy, such as to a single star.

For nearby systems such as Proxima Centauri, we can achieve a precision of approximately one thousandth of an astronomical unit (the distance between the sun and Earth). This should allow us to identify not just the stellar system but the associated planet that transmitted the signal.

With such an approach, the motion on the sky of most signals could be measured in a year or even less. There are other advantages to observing with an interferometric array of telescopes, such as having many completely independent telescopes detecting the same signal.

In addition, radio interference from Earth wouldn’t be registered by telescope sites separated by hundreds of kilometers. So the human made interference that has contributed to so many false positives for SETI, and has included orbiting satellites and even microwave ovens, would completely disappear.

This kind of interferometry is a well-established technique that has been around since the late 1960s. So why are we not doing SETI with it systematically? One reason is that combining data together from an array of telescopes requires more effort in almost all regards, including greater computing resources. An observation of a few minutes would generate many terabytes of data (1 terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes).



Artist’s impression of the Square Kilometer Array. SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions – SKA Project Development Office and Swinburne Astronomy Productions, CC BY-SA But none of these issues are show stoppers, especially as technology continues to advance at unprecedented rates. Perhaps a more important factor is human inertia. Until recently, the SETI community has been quite conservative in its approach, with staff traditionally drawn from single-dish telescopes. These scientists aren’t necessarily familiar with the quirks and foibles of interferometric arrays.

Luckily, that’s finally changing. Breakthrough Listen now looks towards incorporating arrays such as MeerKAT, the Jansky Very Large Telescope (JVLA), and eventually the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in their future survey programs. In the meantime, prepare for a rising tide of ambiguous radio events—and hopefully the reappearance of BLC-1. Determining the precise location and motion of these signals may be the only way of reaching unequivocal conclusions.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Tau Ceti, Latinized from τ Ceti, is a single star in the constellation Cetus that is spectrally similar to the Sun, although it has only about 78% of the Sun's mass. At a distance of just under 12 light-years (3.7 parsecs) from the Solar System, it is a relatively nearby star and the closest solitary G-class star. The star appears stable, with little stellar variation, and is metal-deficient.

Observations have detected more than ten times as much dust surrounding Tau Ceti as is present in the Solar System. Since December 2012, there has been evidence of at least four planets—all confirmed being super-Earths—orbiting Tau Ceti, with two of these being potentially in the habitable zone There are an additional four unconfirmed planets, one of which is a Jovian planet between 3 and 20 AU from the star. Because of its debris disk, any planet orbiting Tau Ceti would face far more impact events than Earth. Despite this hurdle to habitability, its solar analog (Sun-like) characteristics have led to widespread interest in the star. Given its stability, similarity and relative proximity to the Sun, Tau Ceti is consistently listed as a target for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and appears in some science fiction literature.

It can be seen with the unaided eye with an apparent magnitude of 3.5. As seen from Tau Ceti, the Sun would be in the northern hemisphere constellation Boötes with an apparent magnitude of about 2.6.

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Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest sun-like star!



This illustration compares the four planets detected around the nearby star tau Ceti (top) and the inner planets of our solar system (bottom). (Illustration courtesy of Fabo Feng)

A new study by an international team of astronomers reveals that four Earth-sized planets orbit the nearest sun-like star, tau Ceti, which is about 12 light years away and visible to the naked eye. These planets have masses as low as 1.7 Earth mass, making them among the smallest planets ever detected around nearby sun-like stars. Two of them are super-Earths located in the habitable zone of the star, meaning they could support liquid surface water.

The planets were detected by observing the wobbles in the movement of tau Ceti. This required techniques sensitive enough to detect variations in the movement of the star as small as 30 centimeters per second.

"We are now finally crossing a threshold where, through very sophisticated modeling of large combined data sets from multiple independent observers, we can disentangle the noise due to stellar surface activity from the very tiny signals generated by the gravitational tugs from Earth-sized orbiting planets," said coauthor Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

According to lead author Fabo Feng of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, the researchers are getting tantalizingly close to the 10-centimeter-per-second limit required for detecting Earth analogs. "Our detection of such weak wobbles is a milestone in the search for Earth analogs and the understanding of the Earth's habitability through comparison with these analogs," Feng said. "We have introduced new methods to remove the noise in the data in order to reveal the weak planetary signals."

The outer two planets around tau Ceti are likely to be candidate habitable worlds, although a massive debris disc around the star probably reduces their habitability due to intensive bombardment by asteroids and comets.

The same team also investigated tau Ceti four years ago in 2013, when coauthor Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire led an effort in developing data analysis techniques and using the star as a benchmark case. "We came up with an ingenious way of telling the difference between signals caused by planets and those caused by star's activity. We realized that we could see how star's activity differed at different wavelengths and use that information to separate this activity from signals of planets," Tuomi said.

The researchers painstakingly improved the sensitivity of their techniques and were able to rule out two of the signals the team had identified in 2013 as planets. "But no matter how we look at the star, there seem to be at least four rocky planets orbiting it," Tuomi said. "We are slowly learning to tell the difference between wobbles caused by planets and those caused by stellar active surface. This enabled us to essentially verify the existence of the two outer, potentially habitable planets in the system."
Sun-like stars are thought to be the best targets in the search for habitable Earth-like planets due to their similarity to the sun. Unlike more common smaller stars, such as the red dwarf stars Proxima Centauri and Trappist-1, they are not so faint that planets would be tidally locked, showing the same side to the star at all times. Tau Ceti is very similar to the sun in its size and brightness, and both stars host multi-planet systems.

The data were obtained by using the HARPS spectrograph (European Southern Observatory, Chile) and Keck-HIRES (W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii).
A paper on the new findings was accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and is available online. In addition to Vogt, Feng, and Tuomi, coauthors include Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire, UK; John Barnes of the Open University, UK; Guillem Anglada-Escude of Queen Mary University of London; and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute of Washington.

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[ExomatrixTV]

New search methods are ramping up the hunt for alien intelligence
Six decades of radio silence hasn’t stopped scientists from seeking E.T.



Astronomers are enlisting new technologies in the quest to answer one of the most intriguing research questions of all: Are we alone in the universe?

For about a week in 1960, radio astronomer Frank Drake thought he might have discovered aliens.

He had pointed the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s new 26-meter telescope at the star Epsilon Eridani on April 8 of that year, and within minutes, the instruments went wild. The telescope’s readout device, a chart recorder that used a pen to scratch out signatures of incoming signals on paper, scribbled erratically. A speaker connected to the telescope blared a train of strong pulses — just the kind of transmission expected from an intelligent sender. Drake was stunned. Could finding E.T. really be this easy?

It wasn’t. When the telescope found the signal again several days later, a radio antenna pointed in different direction also picked up the noise. The signal wasn’t otherworldly at all; it was coming from an earthly source, like an airplane.

Drake never picked up any interstellar broadcasts during his two months observing Epsilon Eridani and another sunlike star, Tau Ceti, with the radio telescope in West Virginia (SN: 4/30/60). But that first foray into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, sparked a growing field of efforts to scout out fellow intelligent creatures among the stars. And now, with recent discoveries in astronomy, new technologies and a flush of new money, SETI is in renaissance.



In April 1960, radio astronomer Frank Drake used a 26-meter telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia (pictured) to observe two nearby, sunlike stars for alien radio broadcasts. The observing campaign, which he dubbed Project Ozma, was the world’s first modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence.NSF, AUI, NRAO “It’s really difficult to overstate how much the field has been transformed” in the last few years, says Andrew Siemion, director of the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center.

Bigger and better telescopes are probing deeper into the night sky. Sophisticated computational tools are poring over massive datasets on increasing numbers of stars and at a wider variety of frequencies. Observatories around the world are performing regular observations as part of Breakthrough Listen — a $100 million effort funded by Israeli-Russian billionaires Yuri and Julia Milner to conduct the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrials yet (SN: 7/20/15).

So far, SETI scientists have found nothing but radio silence. Still, they are undeterred. They’ve scoured only a tiny fraction of the places E.T. could be (SN: 9/30/18). And SETI’s collective observing power will make scientists 1,000 times more likely to find E.T. during this decade than they were in the 2010s, Siemion says.
This is, he says, “a boom time for SETI.”

Eyes on the sky

For decades, the hunt for intelligent aliens languished on the fringes of the scientific establishment (SN: 1/28/19), viewed by many researchers as a “strange, boutiquey sort of thing that’s not really astronomy,” says Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen. Short-lived U.S. federal funding for the field abruptly ended in 1993, after which “SETI went underground and became very insular.”

But SETI’s profile is changing, as our understanding of the universe evolves. Back when Drake was making his observations, we hadn’t yet laid eyes on a planet around another star. Within just the last decade, we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets, giving new credence to arguments that life beyond Earth is entirely possible (SN: 10/4/19).

In February, Breakthrough Listen released the largest ever stockpile of SETI observations for members of the astronomical community to analyze. The dataset, collected by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder in California, included a survey of radio emissions from the disk of the Milky Way and the region around its core supermassive black hole.



The behemoth 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is one of several observatories around the globe now contributing observations to Breakthrough Listen, the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrial life yet.GBO, AUI, and NSF (CC BY 3.0)

“For finding very advanced civilizations, I think the galactic center is very exciting,” Siemion says. There, he speculates that some super tech-savvy aliens could have built an extremely powerful radio transmitter charged by the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.

To find alien civilizations working with more modest radio equipment comparable to our own, searchers look to nearby stars. That was the approach that Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at Penn State, took in analyzing Breakthrough Listen observations of 20 of the sun’s stellar neighbors. All of those stars are in positions relative to Earth that would allow any aliens around those stars to see Earth orbiting in front of the sun — the same way that telescopes like TESS spot exoplanets (SN: 1/8/19). Those aliens might therefore be able detect Earth’s presence and target our planet with a message.

Sheikh and colleagues came up empty in their search. “Reporting null results isn’t fun,” she says of her analysis, which was posted at arXiv.org on February 14 and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. But it does tell other astronomers “this particular space has already been searched, go search somewhere else,” she says. Given the vast cosmic real estate where E.T. might be, checking out every little stellar neighborhood helps.

New observatories joining the Breakthrough Listen cohort will start looking in a lot of other places in the next few years. The MeerKAT array in South Africa is gearing up to survey 1 million nearby stars. The Very Large Array in New Mexico, seen in the 1997 film Contact, is getting its first SETI instrument and will start looking for aliens in the background of its observations for other astronomy studies in 2021.

Building better filters

Getting more eyes on the sky is a key part of SETI. But while telescopes are heaping up a massive haystack of data, there’s still the task of searching for any needles buried within. And it could take picking through the same data more than once. New computer algorithms can always revisit old observations to search for blips that previous analyses missed.

Often in radio astronomy, “the most interesting discoveries are not made on the first or the second or even the third analysis of the dataset,” Siemion says. For example, brief, brilliant flashes of radio waves from distant galaxies called fast radio bursts were first discovered in a reexamination of old data from the Parkes telescope (SN: 7/25/14).

In SETI, the perennial challenge is devising techniques to better distinguish potential alien signals from radio interference by earthly technology. SETI scientists are usually seeking the same kind of tight, well-defined radio transmissions that human electronics produce. Such signals are easily distinguishable from radio waves emanating from natural sources, such as stars or galaxies, which tend to vary slowly over time or be smeared out across many frequencies. But that means scientists have to judge whether any promising signals they detect are coming from deep space or from a nearby a cell phone or satellite.

One way of doing this is to point a telescope at a target, like a star, then somewhere else. Any radio signals that appear when the telescope is pointed in both directions are probably humanmade radio interference. Conventional computer algorithms detect changes between on-star and off-star observations simply by comparing the amount of energy detected in each observation. But if a faint alien transmission overlaps in the sky with earthly noise, a basic energy-detection algorithm may mistakenly discount everything it sees as humanmade noise.

Some researchers hope artificial intelligence will be better than rigid energy-detection algorithms at detecting subtle changes between on- and off-star observations. While at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, applied machine learning researcher Yunfan Gerry Zhang taught an AI to recognize radio interference from human technology by showing it thousands of observations from the Green Bank Telescope. Using its learned sense of what earthly radio interference looked like, the AI could accurately pick out humanmade noise that was mixed into on-star observations.

If such an algorithm were to detect radio signals from a star that didn’t qualify as humanmade noise, the AI could flag that star for researchers as a potential source of alien transmissions. Zhang’s team presented the AI at the 2018 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing as a tool for finding oddities in future SETI investigations.

Looking for lasers

Radio waves, the focus of mainstream SETI, are not the only means of sending interstellar messages. Aliens could also encode information in nanosecond laser pulses. Though lasers were first suggested as potential interstellar beacons in 1961, most SETI searches have followed Drake in looking for radio communications — partly because radio waves are low energy, and so possibly a more cost-effective way to package interstellar mail.

But optical light could also be a practical interstellar beacon if focused into a narrow laser beam, argue proponents of this approach, called optical SETI or OSETI. Fast laser flashes would be would be detected as a bunch of photons hitting the telescope all at once, as opposed to the steady trickle of incoming photons from background starlight. As a result, for the nanosecond duration of the laser pulse, it could outshine surrounding stars. And no known astrophysical sources produce nanosecond optical blips.

“Optical SETI is still in its infancy, or early toddler phase,” compared with radio SETI, says Shelley Wright, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. But if used in tandem with radio scans of the sky, OSETI efforts can expand the search into entirely different mode of communication.



To take the search for alien laser signals to the next level, researchers have proposed building four dedicated PANOSETI observatories — two in the Northern Hemisphere, two in the south. The observatories’ collective field of view (projected onto the sky in this animation) would cover the entire observable night sky to keep a continual lookout for interstellar laser beacons.PANOSETI team.

In July 2019, the VERITAS telescope array at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona joined Breakthrough Listen. This telescope quartet was built to watch for brief flashes of blue “Cherenkov” light generated by astrophysical gamma rays hitting Earth’s atmosphere. But its fast cameras are also well suited to looking for E.T.’s laser beams.
The VERITAS Breakthrough Listen effort involves both new optical stellar observations and a review of old VERITAS data. Already, some of those analyses have garnered results, even if somewhat disappointing. Nine hours of observations taken from 2009 to 2015 of Tabby’s Star — once suspected of holding an alien megastructure in its orbit due to its bizarre periodic dimming (SN: 1/3/18) — found no alien laser beacons, the researchers reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2016.

Wright and colleagues hope to dramatically expand OSETI with new facilities. While previous OSETI searches, including VERITAS, have targeted specific stars for only minutes at a time, Wright’s team has drawn up a blueprint for four dedicated SETI observatories to keep constant vigil for alien laser pulses across the entire observable sky.

This observatory concept, dubbed PANOSETI, was described at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation meeting in Austin, Texas, in July 2018. Each observatory would be a dome covered in 88 lenses with optical and near-infrared detectors. One pair of observatories in the Northern Hemisphere would keep watch over the northern sky, while a second pair in the south would keep tabs on the southern sky.

Two observatories in two different locations would have to keep watch over the same part of the sky to ensure that anything a single observatory detected wasn’t a glitch or an effect caused by local light pollution, Wright says — the same way a pair of far-flung LIGO detectors teamed up to detect cosmic ripples called gravitational waves (SN: 2/11/16). “Nobody would have believed LIGO without a secondary site,” she says. Double-checking potential detections would be absolutely crucial for a claim as extraordinary as receiving a greeting from E.T.




Citations:

• A.U. Abeysekara et al. A search for brief optical flashes associated with the SETI target KIC 8462852. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 818, February 20, 2016. doi: 10.3847/2041-8205/818/2/L33.
• S.A. Wright et al. Panoramic optical and near-infrared SETI instrument: overall specifications and science program. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Austin, Texas, July 23, 2018. doi: 10.1117/12.2314268.
• S. Sheikh et al. The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life: A 3.95-8.00 GHz search for radio technosignatures in the restricted Earth Transit Zone. arXiv:2002.06162. Posted February 14, 2020.
• Y.G. Zhang. Self-supervised anomaly detection for narrowband SETI. 2018 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing, Anaheim, Calif., November 2018. doi: 10.1109/GlobalSIP.2018.8646437.

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[aoibhghaire]

New Ways To Receive and Scan For Communications from Space are based on the present modes of communications within the EM spectrum.

When one considers at one end of the EM spectrum using radio and the other end using laser detection. Considering the failure of not receiving a signal in the EM spectrum, the question then rises what if this approach may be fundamentally wrong.

Other ETCs out there may be using another mode(s) of communications that are most likely fitting a stellar ETCs premise that within time ETCs would be expanding from there neighbourhood. This is similar to us exploring the Solar system but we are still using antequainted technologies and the EM spectrum for our communications. Using the EM spectrum is futile and doesn’t make sense with inter ETC communications within a stellar neighbourhood /ETC communications at a galactic level with such long distances of light years. There may be a communications directory by a federation of ETCs that have gone well beyond the communications that we use as the EM spectrum.

What would fit such ETCs is applying quantum entanglement proven methods within QM. FTL communications makes a lot more sense using QM methods and tools. Its instantaneous no matter what the distance. No one is developing these tools because of the crises within physics world and the gap we have in the many lab breakthroughs in QM developments that is still in its infancy, having not left the lab bench.

When you consider the UAP reality, there is every indication that the mode of communications is within QM. This category within UAP behaviour mode of communications fits all the characteristics we know of at present. Its not within the EM spectrum. Unfortunately, the scientific community is not ready for this reality because it is unaware of the wide spectrum of reality. When you understand the wide spectrum of reality then QM and in particular quantum super luminal communications QSC may be the norm.

EM spectrum = Electromagnetic spectrum

QM = quantum mechanics

QSC = quantum super luminal

FTL = Faster than light

ETC = Extraterrestrial Civilisations

UAP = Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (now accepted as UFOs)