University of Oxford Partners with Breakthrough Prize Foundation in Search for Life Beyond Earth

The University of Oxford and the Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced a new scientific partnership aimed at finding evidence of signatures of technology beyond our planet.

Oxford will be the international headquarters for the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the largest ever astronomical programme searching for ‘technosignatures’ – evidence of past or present technology that would signal the presence of life beyond planet earth. The partnership will advance the scope and reach of the Listen programme, putting the UK at the forefront of this rapidly growing field, and inject significant resources into technology and software development at the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics.

The University of Oxford’s Department of Physics will be the new international headquarters for the Breakthrough Listen programme. Listen’s arrival at Oxford will enhance existing research strands, introduce a new direction for research and support significant technological innovation. This new partnership includes:

Hardware, software and theoretical advances in radio astrophysics, with a focus on the Square Kilometre Array, a global effort to deliver a transformational radio telescope array by 2030
The search for life on extrasolar planets, including a focus on our nearest neighbours
Detection of astrophysical transients and anomalies in optical transient surveys, including the vast new LSST survey to be delivered by the Rubin Observatory from 2024
Development of new, cutting-edge machine learning techniques to search the vast amounts of incoming astronomical signals for anomalies
Exploring the possibility of using the lunar farside as an interference-free site for radio astronomy

The program will continue to be led by Principal Investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion as part of Oxford’ Astrophysics Department. The partnership preserves existing relationships with UC Berkeley, the University of Manchester, the University of Cambridge, the SKA Observatory, the SETI Institute and other global partners.

Launched in July 2015, Breakthrough Listen is the most ambitious search for technosignatures ever undertaken. The programme has helped transform the search for intelligent life into a rigorous scientific field. Its observations from a global network of the world’s largest and most advanced radio telescopes have surveyed thousands of nearby stars, the Milky Way’s galactic plane and centre, and dozens of nearby galaxies. The Listen team has developed innovative computer and AI systems to digitize billions of radio channels at the same time, across a wide swath of the radio spectrum, and search them for candidate signals. Its more than 70 published papers include the careful analysis of signals of interest, the discovery of new astronomical objects (including 72 Fast Radio Bursts from a rare repeating emitter); and a first-of-its-kind “Exotica” list comprehensively cataloguing objects of astronomical interest.

The partnership with Oxford coincides with an exciting new phase for Breakthrough Listen. The team has recently started working with new data recorded by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. This 64-antenna array – a precursor for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – offers an unprecedented combination of sensitivity, resolution, and field of view on the sky, operating 24/7. The University of Oxford’s Department of Physics is playing a leading role in developing instrumentation and software for both MeerKAT and the SKA, which – once complete – will be the world’s foremost radio astronomy facility.

Breakthrough Listen will also use data from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Northern Chile (expected to be operational in 2024). This uses a 3200 megapixel camera, co-developed with Oxford’s Department of Physics, to image the entire visible sky as seen from Cerro Pachon, Chile, every 3-4 nights, and is predicted to help discover about 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars.

The Breakthrough Listen programme heavily leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to process its huge datasets; in January 2023, the project announced that a new AI-driven method had identified eight previously undetected potential technosignatures. By continuing to develop these tools for Breakthrough Listen, the programme has the potential to help deliver a step-change in big data capabilities that will have applications for a diverse range of industries.

Professor Rob Fender, Head of Astrophysics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford said: “This is an extraordinarily exciting partnership, bringing a large-scale SETI programme to the UK which in turn greatly enhances our existing research programmes at Oxford. This move recognises how the University of Oxford’s existing astrophysics programmes in radio astronomy instrumentation, astrophysical transients and exoplanetary studies make it the perfect base for Breakthrough Listen”.

Dr S. Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives: “We are delighted to launch a new era of Listen here at Oxford. This collaboration will be a tremendous fusion of knowledge, resources, and passion to understand our place in the cosmos.”

Professor Lord Martin Rees FRS, The Astronomer Royal, chair of Breakthrough Listen Advisory Committee, enthusiastically supports the partnership: “It is extremely exciting to see this large SETI programme moving to a UK base. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of mankind’s greatest quests. I am delighted at the prospect of Breakthrough Listen being based at Oxford”.

Professor Ian Shipsey FRS, Head of Physics at the University of Oxford: “Oxford has become a global leader in survey astronomy, the analysis of large-scale datasets, including in the very near future the incredible optical harvest we expect from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Working with Breakthrough Listen on these data will explore previously uncharted territory”.

Media Inquiries

For media enquiries and interviews, contact:
Alexander Buxton, Head of Strategic Communications, University of Oxford
alexander.buxton@admin.ox.ac.uk / +44 7392 288649

For Breakthrough Prize Foundation, contact:
Jan Wootten
JWootten@Rubenstein.com / +1 212-843-8024
Kristen Bothwell
KBothwell@Rubenstein.com / +1 212-843-9227

About Oxford Astrophysics

The Astrophysics sub-department at Oxford is one of the largest astrophysics groups in the country, with a strong and diverse research portfolio. In particular, we are internationally recognised for our observational and theoretical work on cosmology, galaxy evolution, compact objects, astrophysical fluids and exoplanets. We furthermore develop world leading radio, sub-mm, optical and IR instrumentation, to further scientific exploitation. We have invested in major international projects, which will deliver unprecedented datasets in the coming decade, including the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), and the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Astrophysicists at the University of Oxford play a leading role in space projects including the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope and making the first colour movies of black holes. We are also home to Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science platform.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation is a charitable foundation dedicated to advancing fundamental knowledge, celebrating scientific achievement, and utilizing scientific and technological innovations to improve people’s lives and inspire future generations. The Foundation’s programs include the Breakthrough Prize, which recognizes the world’s top scientists in the fields of Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics; the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, an annual global video competition for students to inspire creative scientific thinking; and the Breakthrough Initiatives, a suite of science programs investigating the fundamental questions of life in the universe.