The Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals (BLIPSS), led by Cornell University graduate student Akshay Suresh, is pioneering an unprecedented search for periodic signals emanating from the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This groundbreaking research aims to detect potential repetitive patterns that could be one of the best ways to undertake a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) within our cosmic neighborhood.
The results are described in our new paper, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, as well as in an accompanying press release.
If you have the requisite technical background, we invite you to read the paper, and to download the datasets used (search for "BLGCSurvey") if you wish to explore them or to perform your own analyses.
The BLIPSS software is publicly available. Also available in our repositories are blimpy, a tool for loading filterbank, hdf5, and raw format data files, turboSETI, a tool for performing Doppler drift searches, and SPANDAK, a tool for searching for dispersed transient signals.
You can also download the background art seen here (Credit: Breakthrough Listen / Danielle Futselaar):
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