📡 SETI supercharged with COSMIC upgrade — 80% of sky now scanned in realtime

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) received a major upgrade to detect signatures of advanced alien civilizations across an unprecedented number of cosmic sources.

COSMIC, a new system architecture leveraging the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s facilities, now enables scanning hundreds of thousands of stars rather than thousands for technosignatures like radio emissions.

With machine learning improvements in the pipeline, this constitutes the most comprehensive hunt for alien technologies ever undertaken. Learn more about SETI’s expanded capabilities in today’s Must Read.

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By teaming with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, SETI can now use the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico to process signals from its latest sky survey in real time. This combination of technologies called COSMIC expands search capacity exponentially, with over 500,000 star systems checked for extraterrestrial communications in its first 6 months. The flexible system also intends to study other cosmic phenomena like fast radio bursts.

COSMIC’s design ensures continued ability to handle exponentially more data as upgrades come online, including machine learning for streamlined signal analysis. Beyond transmitting messages, SETI scans from 0.75 to 50 Gigahertz to cover frequencies indicating potential alien agriculture like atmospheric byproducts. The project’s expanded scope boosts the probability of discovering evidence of technological non-human intelligence. 

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