Project Breakthrough Listen to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe announced the release of a catalogue of Exotica, including a complete list of objects that can be linked to man-made signals. The results of the study in the form of a Preprint published on the website of the University of California at Berkeley.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has long been seen as a serious scientific problem. In the framework of the global program SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 2016 launched a project Breakthrough Listen — initiative to search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe in thesignature — potentially man-made signals.
The company Listen greatly expanded search capabilities, has developed a search technology using giant radio telescopes deployed on three continents, which allowed us to cover an unprecedented range of frequencies with high resolution.
All that was found similar in space over the years, included in the innovation catalogue Exotica, which includes 700 different goals for the study — from comets to galaxies, from individual objects to large-scale celestial phenomena.
The fundamental principle of the approach Listen — breadth of the review, the variety of objects observed in the course of the program. According to the authors of the project, it will help astronomers to constrain the range of potential habitats for extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as to exclude the possibility that any phenomena that are typically considered natural, in fact will be artificial.
Directory Exotica contains four categories: 1) prototypes of celestial objects — planets, stars, galaxies and so on; 2) objects with extreme properties is the hottest planet, stars with unusually high or low content of metals, the most distant quasar and the most rapidly spinning pulsar, and the dense galaxy; 3) the anomalies — the mysterious purpose, the behavior of which currently cannot be explained — unexplained optical pulses that last just a few nanoseconds, the stars with excess infrared emission; 4) the control sample of sources that are expected will not produce positive results.
In the directory yet no confirmed thesignature, although, according to the authors, hundreds of astronomical objects can become targets for the search of intelligent life and new astrophysical research.
"Project Breakthrough Listen already greatly expanded the scope and depth of its search — presented in a press release the words of its founder Yuri Milner. — The publication of this directory is a new and important step for the program".
"When it comes to searching for intelligent life, it is important to avoid bias, says study leader Pete warden (Pete Worden), Executive Director of all projects Breakthrough Initiatives. — Until we floodplains��m more about the forms that can be used with another civilization and its technology, we need to explore all possible goal. Cataloging — the first step to this".
"the Search for thesignature to date has largely focused on the search for life as we know it: the stars, in particular those that have planets with potential for liquid water on their surfaces. Advanced search Breakthrough Listen allowed us to consider a much broader range of possible technological environments," says one of the authors of the publication, Andrew Simon (Andrew Siemion), head of the research group’s Breakthrough Listen working at the Research center SETI (all BSRC) at the University of California at Berkeley.
"Many discoveries in astronomy were not planned, — said his colleague, first author, Dr. Brian lackey (Brian Lacki). Sometimes an important discovery can be ignored because no one looked in the right place, because it is not believed that there may be something to find. It happened with exoplanets that could be detected much earlier, if astronomers looking for planetary systems, unlike ours. Perhaps we are looking for thesignature in the wrong places. Directory Exotica will help us to answer this question".
Scientists say that the directory does not limited only by the scope of the program SETI — any new academic program can use it as a guide to the Universe.
