Breakthrough Listen, headquartered at the University of Oxford – the most ambitious project to date searching for technosignatures (signs of technology as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence) – is partnering with ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and the University of Manchester, to deploy a new all-sky monitor at the Westerbork Observatory in the Netherlands. The new experiment takes phased array feeds (PAFs) – essentially wide-field radio cameras – that were previously deployed on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), and installs them on the ground, looking up at the sky directly.
Published by the editorial team, 12 May 2025
“Westerbork has a long history of pushing the envelope of radio astronomy technology,” remarks Jessica Dempsey, Director of ASTRON. “Our new collaboration takes advantage of incredible advances in computing power since we first built the PAFs, enabling us to get a real-time view of the whole sky in a way that wasn’t possible before. The Westerbork Observatory is uniquely positioned to do these sensitive all-sky observations in one of the last remaining radio quiet zones in Europe.”
The Westerbork Observatory is uniquely positioned to do sensitive observations with the all-sky monitor in one of the last remaining radio quiet zones in Europe.
“Breakthrough Listen has partnered with observatories around the world to scan over a million stars for technosignatures,” explains Andrew Siemion, Principal Investigator for Breakthrough Listen at the University of Oxford. “Each of our telescopes has unique strengths. With big dishes like the Green Bank Telescope, we’re in the driving seat, and can point the telescope at nearby stars to study them in detail. With arrays of antennas like MeerKAT, we use a supercomputer to take a copy of the data from the observatory. We electronically combine the signals to study targets within the region of sky where the telescope is pointing, without impacting the primary user’s observations.”
“Now, with our new partnership with ASTRON, we’re not limited to a small region of the celestial sphere,” explains Michael Garrett, Sir Bernard Lovell Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. “We can monitor the entire visible sky, day and night, and look for transients – signals that appear and disappear – as well as variable sources that change in brightness, and anomalous sources with unusual characteristics.”
Simulated output of the Apertif phased array field in transient and technosignature search mode.
The new instrument takes advantage of cutting edge processing technology enabled by the latest computer chips. “Breakthrough Listen has been partnering with NVIDIA to implement streaming data processing using our Holoscan platform,” explains Adam Thompson, Principal Technical Product Manager for NVIDIA. “Building on our recent successes with Holoscan at the Allen Telescope Array, where we used an AI-driven pipeline to detect fast radio bursts in real time, we’re excited to deploy Holoscan at Westerbork. We’ll be probing new regions of search space and we anticipate new discoveries and a new understanding of the radio Universe as a result.”
“‘Are we alone in the Universe?’ is one of the most profound questions in science,” says Breakthrough Initiatives Executive Director, S. Pete Worden. “Although we’ve not yet detected a confirmed technosignature, Breakthrough Listen has placed some of the strongest constraints to date on the presence of intelligent life beyond Earth. We’ve also developed flexible digital technology that is giving us a new understanding of fast radio bursts, flaring stars, and other unusual astrophysical objects. Our new partnership provides impressive new capabilities for our search, and a testbed as we prepare for the next generation of radio telescopes including the Square Kilometre Array.”