Dear friends,
I am thrilled to report another successful observing run at the Green Bank Telescope on May 13, 2023. We observed over 1000 additional stars and their planetary systems with 16 pairs of scans. Everything went smoothly and our timing was quasi-optimal, with just 30 seconds to spare before handing the telescope over to the next observer. It was great to see that the two-bit sampling mode that we have been using for the past 7 years is now accessible from the Astronomer's Integrated Desktop (Astrid), a development that we owe to our telescope friend and collaborator Ryan Lynch. In this mode, we recover 88% of the power of a perfectly sampled signal and benefit from reduced data storage requirements. UCLA graduate student Megan Li promptly processed the data, which we will upload to our citizen science platform soon.
Also on May 13, I had the great pleasure of participating as a speaker and panelist at Alien Night!, an event at Wildwood School in Santa Monica. The guest of honor was Dr. Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute, whose SETI career and sense of humor are both legendary. The questions from students, parents, educators, and conspiracy theorists were really fun and interesting. I have been invited to speak at Wildwood School again shortly before the upcoming annular eclipse on the morning of Saturday, October 14, 2023. Although Los Angeles is not in the path of the annular eclipse, the partial eclipse will be substantial here, with the Moon obscuring 70% of the surface of the Sun.
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A sequence of photographs obtained during the 2017 annular solar eclipse in Patagonia, South America. Image credit: Jay M. Pasachoff and Christian Lockwood.
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Earlier this month, I inquired with our colleagues Bill Diamond and Andrew Siemion at the SETI Institute about establishing a formalized process by which UCLA SETI could follow up and verify potentially interesting signals with a small time allocation at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and/or with the new COSMIC system at the Very Large Array (VLA). Based on past experience, we know that we would not need much telescope time to accomplish this verification. With ~65 million existing signals, we have not encountered a single signal that we were unable to rule out internally as Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). Nevertheless, we would like to be prepared with a concrete and rehearsed reobservation plan in place in case a signal cannot immediately be ruled out as RFI. Bill and Andrew seemed receptive to the idea and suggested broadening the arrangement to include multiple groups and observatories. We will have a Zoom meeting later this week to continue the conversation.
The Spring 2023 UCLA SETI course has 10 undergraduate students and 5 graduate students enrolled. Several software projects this year are devoted to the scientific principle of reproducibility. We are writing software interfaces to enable UCLA SETI data to be processed by the Breakthrough Listen (BL) pipeline, and to enable BL data to be processed by the UCLA SETI pipeline. I am excited about adding these new capabilities to our pipeline.
Warm regards,
Jean-Luc Margot
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