Bridging Technosignatures, Astrobiology, and the SKA

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Conference venue

Interstellar Frontiers 2024 will be held at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre (PCEC). The PCEC is adjacent to the Swan River (Derbarl Yerrigan), and connected to the Elizabeth Quay train station and busport.

Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre and Elizabeth Quay

Flights

Perth International Airport is a 20-minute drive from the PCEC venue. In addition to taxis, rideshare services Uber, Didi and Ola operate from the airport. The international airport is also serviced by a train line, operated by Transperth. More details can be found on the PCEC website:

https://www.pcec.com.au/attend/staying-in-perth/

Conference Hotels

Perth has many hotels, most (if not all) of which can be booked via the major price comparison and hotel booking websites. For convenience, here’s a link to the TripAdvisor map page for Perth WA:

https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotels-g255103-Perth_Greater_Perth_Western_Australia-Hotels.html

We have nonetheless arranged for special rates at the two closest hotels, the Parmelia Hilton Perth and Adina Apartment Hotel.

Parmelia Hilton Perth

The Parmelia Hilton Perth is located a short 3-minute walk from PCEC and enjoys prime location to access all of Perth’s iconic landmarks.

The link below offers 20% off the Hilton’s Best Available Rate (BAR) for conference attendees.

Booking link: https://www.hilton.com/en/book/reservation/rooms/?ctyhocn=PERHITW&arrivalDate=2024-03-10&departureDate=2024-03-15&groupCode=CMTG4&room1NumAdults=1&cid=OM%2CWW%2CHILTONLINK%2CEN%2CDirectLink

Adina Apartment Hotel Perth

Conveniently located in the Perth CBD, the 4.5-star Adina Apartment Hotel Perth is right next to the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre and a step away from the Elizabeth Quay, Train Station and major landmarks including Kings Park. Each of the stylish studios, one and two-bedroom apartments provide all the comforts you need including fully equipped kitchens and plenty living space with private outdoor balconies. 

The link below offers 10% off the Adina’s Best Available Rate (BAR) for conference attendees. Please use promo code PERTHCONV if prompted.

Booking link: https://gc.synxis.com/rez.aspx?Chain=14687&locale=en-US&promo=PERTHCONV

SOC / LOC

Invited Speakers and SOC

High Precision Astrometry: Not Just for Exoplanets - Recovering Properties of Host Stars and the Impacts on their Harboured planet(s)

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.

COSMIC: All-sky techno-signature search with a commensal instrument

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.