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Investor Yuri Milner joins with Berkeley in $100 million search for extraterrestrial intelligence
July 21, 2015
On Monday July 20th, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and it's founder, famed internet investor Yuri Milner, announced a contract with UC Berkeley that will provide a massive boost of funding towards the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The foundation has pledged $100 million dollars over the next 10 years to UC Berkeley and other additional institutions as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, a project aimed at creating and building new instruments to better analyze information collected by two telescopes that have been contracted through the project: the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes Telescope…
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CalDay 2015!
March 23, 2015
CalDay 2015 is almost here! On April 18th the campus opens up to the public for hands-on activities, lectures, presentations, tours, food, and other opportunities to engage with the campus community. The Astronomy department is hosting a number of events; see below for a complete listing so you can plan out your day! Are We Alone?: SETI@home & the Search for ET Hear about Berkeley's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program at the world's largest telescopes. Volunteers have a small-but-captivating chance that their computer will detect the first signal from a civilization beyond earth. 11:00-12:00, 3 Leconte - Dan Werthimer “Pluto, Ceres, and Below: What…
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New Instrument Extends the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence to New Realms
March 23, 2015
From Astronomy Magazine: "Astronomers have expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light. Their new instrument has just begun to scour the sky for messages from other worlds. “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright from the University of California (UC) in San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. Pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust…
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Meet Dan Werthimer
February 23, 2015
Watch the Berkeley SETI Research Center's video profile for Dan Werthimer, Chief Scientist and co-founder of SETI@home and long-time department member! Courtesy of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, Chris Schodt, and Steve Croft.
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Intelligent civilizations rarer than one in a million
February 8, 2013
"Scientists at UC Berkeley have now used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars. While discovering no telltale signs of life, the researchers calculate that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have planetary civilizations advanced enough to transmit beacons we could detect. “We didn’t find ET, but we were able to use this statistical sample to, for the first time, put rather explicit limits on the presence of intelligent civilizations transmitting in the radio band where we searched,” said Andrew Siemion,…
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