• CART Astrophysics Seminar Series

September 5, 2024 2:00 PM - September 5, 2024 3:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:

Greg Taylor

Presenter:

Chenoa Tremblay

The search for intelligence outside our solar system is more than 60 years old and we have recently moved the search from 1000 objects in a 5-year observational program to up to 2000 stars per hour. This is possible due the new Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster or COSMIC backend system on the VLA. Using an Ethernet-based system, we record, channelize, correlate, and beamform the VLA data streams after digitization in the COSMIC compute cluster. Initially, the system is used in conjunction with the VLA all-sky survey (VLASS) to conduct the largest and most sensitive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). However, the flexibility of the design allows for other science goals to be achieved in the future and we will welcome requests from the community for potential use. Our system for ETI searches is designed to ingest data at any observed frequency and search for signals of unknown origin with a time resolution of 0.1 to 5 seconds and a frequency resolution of 0.2 to 10 Hz. Any potentially interesting signals will cause small chunks of voltage data to be dumped onto the disk for further analysis. In this talk, I will discuss the COSMIC system design, flexibility, initial goals, and the potential for other guest science projects proposed by the astronomy community, including RFI monitoring.