Video: “Frontiers in Artifact SETI: Waste Heat, Alien Megastructures & Tabbys Star”

posted recently about  Tabby’s Star, also known as the “Alien Megastructure Star”.  In the SETI Institute seminar video below, Prof. Jason Wright of Penn State University reviews what’s known about the star and discusses the latest findings on the star in the context of searches for “Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies”.

From the caption:

In 1960 two seminal papers in SETI were published, providing two visions for SETI. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s proposed detecting deliberate radio signals (“communication SETI”), while Freeman Dyson (“artifact SETI”), proposed detecting the inevitable effects of massive energy supplies and artifacts on their surroundings. While communication SETI has now had several career-long practitioners, artifact SETI has, until recently, not been a vibrant field of study.

The launch of the Kepler and WISE satellites have greatly renewed interest in the field, however, and the recent Breakthrough Listen Initiative has provided new motivation for finding good targets for communication SETI. Dr. Wright will discuss the progress of the Ĝ Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies, including its justification and motivation, waste heat search strategy and first results, and the framework for a search for megastructures via transit light curves. The last of these led to the identification of KIC 8462852 (a.k.a. “Tabby’s Star”) as a candidate ETI host. This star, discovered by Boyajian and the Zooniverse Planet Hunters, exhibits several apparently unique and so-far unexplained photometric properties, and continues to confound natural explanation.