Bridging Technosignatures, Astrobiology, and the SKA
Conaire Deagan (he/him), UNSW
Significant interest in the SETI community revolves around the Alpha Centauri star system due to its proximity and similarities to our solar system. One upcoming mission - the TOLIMAN space telescope - is designed with innovative optics to achieve high-precision astrometry to detect the presence of an Earth-twin around either Alpha Cen A or B. This level of precision - better than 1 micro arc-second - has opened new opportunities in stellar physics. This presentation demonstrates the feasibility of using TOLIMAN or other long-term, high-precision astrometric missions to monitor stellar activity. By detecting magnetic surface features, such as star-spots, we can infer properties of the host stars. These properties include relative inclination, magnitude and frequency of star-spots, differential rotation curves, and potentially the presence (or absence) of a Sun-like dynamo. These insights will provide information regarding the stellar environment and habitability of any exoplanets present. Understanding the host star in detail is crucial, as things such as the stellar wind, the frequency and intensity of stellar flares, and the topology of the stellar magnetosphere directly impact the sustainability of biospheres in the surrounding environment.
Chenoa Tremblay (She/Her), SETI Institute
The search for intelligence outside our solar system is 60 years old and we have recently moved the search from 1000 objects in a 5-year observational program to over 1 million objects per year. This is made possible thanks to the new Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster or COSMIC backend system on the VLA. The COSMIC compute cluster receives a copy of the VLA data streams after digitization and we are utilizing an ethernet-based system to record, channelize, correlate, and beamform the data. The initial goal of the system is to process data simultaneously along with the VLA all-sky survey (VLASS) to complete the largest, most sensitive, search for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). COSMIC is designed to ingest the data at any observing frequency and search with time resolutions between 0.1 to 5 seconds and frequency resolutions between 0.2 and 10 Hz for signals of unknown origin. Any potentially interesting signals will trigger small chunks of voltage data to be dumped onto the disk for further investigation. In this talk, we will discuss the history of SETI and why this system is important, system design, flexibility, initial goals, and the potential for other guest science projects proposed by the astronomy community.