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takyon writes:

Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner have announced Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that will increase the intensity of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or their signals):

Speaking at the launch, Prof Hawking said: "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. "Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos - unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Those behind the initiative claim it to be the biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. They plan to cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes and scan five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster. It will involve access to two of the world's most powerful telescopes. - the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Yuri Milner is known for his creation and funding of Breakthrough Prizes, which award $3 million to researchers for achievements in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics. Also reported at Washington Post, NPR, El Reg, and Scientific American.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Beginning in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope began looking at approximately 150,000 stars for signs of objects orbiting with some recognizable pattern in an attempt to find exo-planets. Now Ross Anderson writes in The Atlantic that scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look at KIC 8462852, a star that undergoes irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level that can last for between 5 and 80 days.

"We'd never seen anything like this star," says Tabetha Boyajian. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out." Dips in the light emitted by stars are often shadows cast by transiting planets especially when they repeat, periodically, as you'd expect if they were caused by orbiting objects. Boyajian, a Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing KIC 8462852's bizarre light pattern and explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.

SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Jason Wright says the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a "swarm of megastructures," perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. "When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," says Wright. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build." Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion on a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they'll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth's network of radio stations. "In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky," says Anderson, "where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days."

Original Submission

Bobs writes:

"The star KIC 8462852 (aka 'Tabby's Star') got a lot of press late last year because it was acting funny. It was undergoing a series of apparently random dips in brightness. Some of these dips were serious, with the amount of starlight dropping a staggering 22 percent.

That's a lot. It couldn't be a planet passing in front of the star, because the dips weren't periodic, and the amount of starlight blocked is different every time. Plus, even a planet as big as Jupiter (which is about as big as planets can get) would block less than one percent of the star's light at best.

[...] That left some speculation about, um, aliens. While it's incredibly unlikely, it does kinda fit what we're seeing.

[...] But still, the star is weird. We just found out it's even weirder than we thought.

Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Lousiana State University... [who] found that Tabby's Star has been photographed over 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 – 1989.

What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!

That's... bizarre. Tabby's Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that's hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby's Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

Again. That's bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen."

Above excerpted from Article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/01/18/tabby_s_star_faded_substantially_over_past_century.html

They say it can't be caused by large dust cloud because they would see a known and detectable IR signature. So, aliens? Are they blinking at us in their 'morse code'? Building a hyperspace bypass? Got a better idea?

Schaefer's paper: KIC8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165±0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.03256v1.pdf

F-type stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-type_main-sequence_star

Original about oddness in Oct 2015: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/10/14/weird_star_strange_dips_in_brightness_are_a_bit_baffling.html

FYI: The dimming is not caused by rapid rotation of star: https://twitter.com/Astro_Wright/status/689163586749333504

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Recently, some astronomers and others have excitedly pointed to Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) as a possible example of alien megastructures causing a star to dim. A new study favors a more terrestrial explanation - a planetary collision with the star:

A new study set to be published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that smart aliens aren't responsible for KIC 8462852's dimming. Instead, the authors suggest, a planetary collision with Tabby's Star is to blame. This crash would explain not only why Tabby's Star has had wild fluctuations in brightness as of late, but why the star has been dimming gradually over the course of the last century.

It seems strange that a spectacular collision between a star and planet would cause a star to become dimmer, explains Ken Shen, a UC Berkeley astronomer and author on the study. But, says Shen, "the star has to eventually go back to being dimmer—the equilibrium state—the state that it was at before the collision."

KC 8462852's more recent and erratic dimming episodes, however, can be explained by a mess of debris moving around the star and absorbing its light, sometimes making it appear significantly dimmer to us Earthlings.

Previously:
Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird.
"Breakthrough Listen" to Search for Alien Radio Transmissions Near Tabby's Star

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Tabby's Star, speculated to be surrounded by a cloud of debris or alien megastructures, has dimmed yet again, causing multiple observatories to take notice:

Among the telescopes [Jason] Wright said researchers now hope to use to catch this dimming event in the act:

—The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope
—The Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory near San Jose, Calif., a robotic optical telescope
—Both telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which operate in optical and near-infrared wavelengths
—The MMT Observatory in Arizona, an optical telescope
—NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, which operates in gamma ray, x-ray, ultraviolet and optical wavelengths
—Las Cumbres Observatory, a worldwide network of robotic optical telescopes
—Fairborn Observatory in Arizona, which operates in optical wavelengths
—The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, which operates in optical and near-infrared wavelengths
—The Hobby–Eberly Telescope in Texas, an optical telescope

Also at The Verge.

One astronomer has proposed looking at the nearest 43 to 85 pulsars for megastructures (arXiv):

Osmanov estimates that the habitable zone around a relatively slowly-rotating pulsar (with a period of about half a second) would be on the order of 0.1 AU. According to his calculations, a ring-like megastructure that orbited a pulsar at this distance would emit temperatures on the order of 390 K (116.85 °C; 242.33 °F), which means that the megastructure would be visible in the IR band.

Previously: Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird.
"Breakthrough Listen" to Search for Alien Radio Transmissions Near Tabby's Star
Non-Alien Explanation for Tabby's Star Dimming: It Ate a Planet

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Breakthrough Listen has massively expanded its survey of stars using the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia:

Breakthrough Listen – the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe – announced today that a survey of millions of stars located in the plane of our Galaxy, using the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope ("Parkes") in New South Wales, Australia, has commenced. Listen observations at Parkes began in November 2016¹, targeting a sample consisting mostly of stars within a few light years of Earth. Now, observations have expanded to cover a huge swath of the Milky Way visible from the site.

The expanded survey is made possible by new capabilities installed at Parkes by Breakthrough Listen: new digital instrumentation capable of recording the huge data rates from the Parkes "multibeam" receiver. The previous receivers used by Listen only observed a single point on the sky at a time, and were used to perform a detailed search of stars near to the Sun for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. In contrast, the multibeam receiver has 13 beams, enabling a fast survey of large areas of the sky, covering all of the Galactic Plane visible from the site.

Even if Breakthrough Listen doesn't find aliens, it is throwing a lot of well-deserved cash at astronomers and upgrading the capabilities of their telescopes.

Also at Space.com and USA Today.

Breakthrough Listen: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
"Breakthrough Listen" to Search for Alien Radio Transmissions Near Tabby's Star
Breakthrough Listen to Observe Interstellar Asteroid 'Oumuamua for Radio Emissions

CSIRO Parkes: Famous Australian 'Dish' Radio Telescope to be Emptied in Budget Crisis: CSIRO
Milky Way Obscures Hundreds of Previously Undiscovered Galaxies
New Fast Radio Burst Discovery Finds 'Missing Matter' in the Universe

Original Submission

martyb writes:

New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life:

Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.

New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.

"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.

"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.