Breakthrough Listen represents humanity's most significant effort to date to quantify the distribution of advanced life in the Universe, using a global network of the world's largest and most advanced radio telescopes to search for signatures of technology. The project is undertaking a detailed census of hundreds of nearby stars, in addition to casting a wider net across millions more stars, the entire plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, and additional galaxies beyond.
Since 2023, Breakthrough Listen has been based in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, led by Principal Investigator Dr Andrew Siemion. Its research connects with key departmental strengths including exoplanet science, machine learning, radio instrumentation, digital signal processing, citizen science, sky surveys, and time-domain astronomy. Listen also supports undergraduate and graduate education through student supervision.
The project uses major facilities such as the Green Bank Telescope (USA), Parkes (Australia), and the MeerKAT array (South Africa), and partners with Jodrell Bank (UK), China’s FAST, VERITAS, and the Murchison Widefield Array—several of which are precursors to the Square Kilometre Array.
From 2025, Listen will incorporate data from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, which will image the entire southern sky every few nights using a 3200-megapixel camera co-developed with Oxford, aiding the discovery of billions of stars and galaxies, as well as transient and variable objects.
Listen systems process enormous data volumes—hundreds of gigabits per second at Green Bank and Parkes, and up to five terabits per second at MeerKAT—using advanced AI to scan billions of radio channels across the spectrum. These technologies have also advanced other areas of astronomy, including studies of fast radio bursts.
The project is committed to open science, making its data widely available to researchers and experts in fields like deep learning and signal processing. A central challenge is distinguishing genuine cosmic signals from the vast background of human-made interference—perhaps even detecting our first message from an alien civilisation.
