Bridging Technosignatures, Astrobiology, and the SKA
Thank you to everyone who attended Interstellar Frontiers 2024, both in-person and online. It was fantastic to hear talks across a diverse range of disciplines, all working toward improving our understanding of life beyond Earth. We are extremely grateful to Breakthrough Initiatives and SKAO for sponsoring the meeting, our SOC for putting together a great …
Thank you to all for a great start to Interstellar Frontiers! We have made some minor updates to the conference website, including the Things to do section with upcoming local events.
We are looking forward to welcoming you here in Perth on 11th March! The full talk schedule is now available; see the agenda page for further updates. Unfortunately, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is no longer able to support tours, so no activities are scheduled on Thursday.
Interstellar Frontiers will now be a three-day meeting, and we are considering offering tours of local facilities on the fourth day. The agenda is now: The full talk schedule will be available shortly; see the agenda page for further updates. More information will be provided regarding Zoom login details and other logistics as we get …
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is excited to open registration and Abstract Submissions for an upcoming SETI and astrobiology conference “Interstellar Frontiers: Bridging SETI, Astrobiology, and the SKA” taking place 11-15 March 2024. The search for life has progressed rapidly during the last five years in the fields of astrobiology and astronomy. The growth is a …
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is thrilled to announce an upcoming technosignature and astrobiology conference “Interstellar Frontiers: Bridging Technosignatures, Astrobiology, and the SKA” taking place in March 2024. The search for life has progressed rapidly during the last five years in the fields of astrobiology and astronomy. The growth is a combination of new technologies on older telescopes, new …
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.