SETI Institute

PRESS RELEASE: https://buff.ly/3UN4exl SETI Institute Strengthens Science Advisory Board with Five New Members The SETI Institute welcomed five new experts to its Science Advisory Board (SAB), broadening its scope in important scientific and ethical domains essential to understanding life and intelligence in the universe. The new members bring expertise in science communication, ethics and philosophy, animal cognition and intelligence, analysis of extraterrestrial materials, and planetary astronomy. Joining the SAB are: Jordan Bimm (University of Chicago), Chelsea Haramia (Spring Hill College and University of Bonn), Lori Marino (Whale Sanctuary Project and The Kimmela Center for Scholarship-based Animal Advocacy), Keiko Nakamura-Messenger (ExLabs LLC) and Quanzhi Ye (University of Maryland). “SETI is a multifaceted, truly interdisciplinary endeavor that brings unique challenges,” said Lucian Walkowicz, Chair, SETI Institute Science Advisory Board. “I’m excited to welcome our new Science Advisory Board members in helping the SETI Institute meet those challenges, broadening the scope of the Board with both depth of knowledge and creative thinking.” These new members enhance the SAB’s collective knowledge and network. They join a team that provides strategic guidance on scientific priorities, collaborative opportunities and funding sources for the SETI Institute’s research, education and outreach initiatives. SAB members serve renewable two-year terms, advising SETI Institute leadership on national and global science priorities to guide its mission in understanding the origins and distribution of life and intelligence in the cosmos. "The SETI Institute is privileged to have access to an extraordinary group of scientists and scholars who provide critically important counsel, guidance and outside perspectives through our Science Advisory Board," said Bill Diamond, SETI Institute CEO. "The SAB helps us stay on top of the latest developments in relevant fields of research and navigate the complex and nuanced domain of government-funded science. Our five newest members bring diverse scientific and cultural perspectives to the SAB together with their extraordinary professional backgrounds. From planetary science, materials science and philosophy to neuroscience and the history of science, we are thrilled to have these distinguished scholars add their voices and expertise to the SAB.”

https://buff.ly/3OtJZAZ Dr. Sofia Sheikh from the SETI Institute led a study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals -- the spinning remnants of massive stars -- distort as they travel through space.

#PPOD: A Lonely Landscape This picture may look like a lonely mountain, but this landscape is out of our world—it's one of the closest color images ever taken of the surface of a comet. On March 10, 2015, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft used the OSIRIS camera to take this close-up of the tortured and jagged surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from a distance of just 29 kilometers. Comet 67P is a four-kilometer-wide frozen mountain of rock and ice, hurtling through space on a long six-and-a-half-year orbit around the Sun. Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA; processing by Giuseppe Conzo Sign up for our enews: https://buff.ly/4fXseWM

Tonight, in person and online: https://buff.ly/3YZJ684 7:30 pm PST, Vancouver Location: Simon Fraser University Burnaby Room AQ3149 Topic: Exploring the Cosmos: 40 Years of SETI Research Speaker: Dr. Franck Marchis For millennia, humans have gazed at the stars, wondering if we are alone in the universe. Forty years ago, this age-old question took a scientific turn with the establishment of the SETI Institute. Franck Marchis, Senior Astronomer and Director of Citizen Science at the Institute, will provide an engaging update on the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This presentation will cover the innovative methods and technologies currently in use, along with highlighting significant recent findings. While definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life remains elusive, our understanding has expanded dramatically. Join us as we explore the potential of discovering an inhabited exoplanet in the next decade, a discovery that could fundamentally alter our view of the universe and our place within it.

Last week, I had the privilege of presenting the first Jill Tarter Award for innovation in the search for life beyond Earth, to none other than Jill Tarter herself, at the 40th anniversary gala of the SETI Institute. This is an interdisciplinary prize that the Institute will award each year, in honor of Jill's remarkable career and body of work. The image shows Jill giving a moving talk about SETI after the presentation (the medal is hanging around her neck.) I have known and admired Jill since we were grad students at the University of California, Berkeley (many years ago.)

PODCAST: https://buff.ly/3Bc5fYW How do we know where to look for life on other planets? SETI scientists use analog sites on Earth to study not only how life has evolved here but also the geological conditions that made it possible. Devon Island in Canada is one such analog. It's been called Mars on Earth. In this third episode, Gary Niederhoff talks with planetary scientist Pascal Lee, co-founder of The Mars Institute and principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. They discuss how a remote arctic island offers clues about how liquid water once flowed on Mars, why the moons of the Red Planet are so mysterious, and Pascal’s discovery of a heretofore unrecognized Martian volcano in 2024.

#PPOD: First Close-up Picture of a Star Outside our Galaxy Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, at a staggering distance of over 160,000 light-years from us, WOH G64 is a dying star roughly 2000 times the size of the Sun. This image of the star (left) is the first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy. This breakthrough was possible thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI), located in Chile. The new image, taken with the VLTI’s GRAVITY instrument, shows that the star is enveloped in a large egg-shaped dust cocoon. The image on the right shows an artist’s impression, reconstructing the geometry of the structures around the star, including the bright oval envelope and a fainter dusty torus. Confirming the presence and shape of this torus will require additional observations. Credit: ESO/K. Ohnaka et al., L. Cal?ada Listen to the SETI Live podcast: https://buff.ly/4eQVnlp

PRESS RELEASE: https://buff.ly/3CGL85A Team Unlocks New Insights on Pulsar Signals Dr. Sofia Sheikh from the SETI Institute led a study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals—the spinning remnants of massive stars—distort as they travel through space. This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, was performed by a multi-year cohort of undergraduate researchers in the Penn State branch of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory student club. Maura McLaughlin, Chair, Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, created the Pulsar Search Collaboratory to engage high schoolers and undergraduates in pulsar science, and she helped facilitate access to the data used in this study. Using archival data from the Arecibo Observatory, the student team found patterns that show how pulsar signals change as they move through the interstellar medium (ISM), the gas and dust that fills the space between stars. The team measured scintillation bandwidths for 23 pulsars, including new data for six pulsars not previously studied. The results showed that in almost all cases, measured bandwidths were higher than predictions by widely used models of the galaxy, highlighting a need for updates to current ISM density models. “This work demonstrates the value of large, archived datasets,” said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, SETI Institute researcher and lead author. “Even years after the Arecibo Observatory's collapse, its data continues to unlock critical information that can advance our understanding of the galaxy and enhance our ability to study phenomena like gravitational waves.” When radio light from a pulsar travels through the ISM, it gets distorted in a process known as "diffractive interstellar scintillation” (DISS). The same physics that makes light refract into patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool or causes stars to twinkle in the night sky also causes DISS. Instead of water in a pool or air in the atmosphere, DISS occurs when clouds of charged particles in space cause a pulsar's light to "twinkle" across time and frequency. Collaborations such as the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center use pulsars to study the gravitational wave background, which can help researchers understand the early Universe and the prevalence of gravitational-wave sources such as supermassive black-hole binaries. The pulsar timing measurements must be extremely precise to measure the gravitational wave background correctly. The results from this study will help better model the distortions caused by DISS, which will increase the precision of the pulsar timing measurements of projects like NANOGrav.

On 20 Nov 2024, astrobiologist Dale Anderson spoke with Bill Diamond, President & CEO of the SETI Institute, about the research that his team is conducting at Lake Untersee, Antarctica. Watch: https://buff.ly/3V4hw8L

Big Picture Science Radio Show - Skeptic Check: Near Death Experiences (ENCORE) Near-death experiences can be profound and even life-changing. People describe seeing bright lights, staring into the abyss, or meeting dead relatives. Many believe these experiences to be proof of an afterlife. But now, scientists are studying these strange events and gaining insights into the brain and consciousness itself. Will we uncover the scientific underpinning of these near-death events? Listen: https://buff.ly/3OnoFwW #podcast #science