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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

UC Berkeley will use the Green Bank [wikipedia.org] radio telescope to observe Tabby's Star [berkeley.edu] (KIC 8462852 [wikipedia.org]) as part of the Breakthrough Listen [wikipedia.org] initiative:

Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star. "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby's star has looked at it," he said. "It's been looked at with Hubble, it's been looked at with Keck, it's been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found."

While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star's unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can't not take a look. They've teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.

The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.

Also at BBC [bbc.com].

Previously: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project [soylentnews.org]
Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures [soylentnews.org]
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird. [soylentnews.org]

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