Drag the map to an orange ring and press Start. Your own computer checks a real piece of a radio telescope recording for a signal. .
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Drag the map. Every orange ring is a place a giant radio telescope really listened to.
You get a small piece of that recording. Your own computer checks it for a signal. It takes seconds.
Usually: nothing, or one of our own satellites. That is normal. Either way, that piece of sky is now checked, and it counts.
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The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, in a radio-quiet valley of West Virginia, is the largest fully steerable dish on Earth. Breakthrough Listen points it at nearby stars and publishes what it records.
See Where It PointedA transmitter on a planet or a spacecraft is accelerating relative to us, so its tone slides slowly in frequency. The search adds up the power along every possible slide and keeps the strongest. Nothing known in nature draws that thin diagonal line.
Each disc is the real sky around the target, drawn star by star from a catalogue. Pick one and the map swings to it.
A comet from another star, caught crossing the Solar System in 2019. The telescope listened as it passed.
Aim hereThe most distant thing humans have built, still whispering home. The one signal we know is real.
Aim hereMore stars in one beam than anywhere else in the sky. Breakthrough Listen surveyed it field by field.
Aim hereVega, Tabby’s Star and other famous names are in the archive too, in a compressed format this site cannot slice yet.
Yes. The recordings come from the Green Bank Telescope in the USA, the largest steerable radio dish on Earth. A project called Breakthrough Listen made them public.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows if anyone is out there, and no one has found a signal yet. That is exactly why people keep looking. The chance on any one piece is tiny, but somebody has to look, and it might as well be you.
The page marks it as a candidate and records the star, the frequency and the time. Most candidates turn out to be our own satellites. A real one has to show up again, and only when the telescope points at that star, and that takes astronomers to confirm. This site cannot confirm it alone.
No. No download to install, no sign-up. It runs inside this page.
Yes. It is like playing a video: the page uses your graphics card for a moment. Close the tab and it stops.
It should. If the phone cannot use its graphics chip, the page uses the processor instead, which is slower. Each check downloads 64 MB, so use Wi-Fi.
Because that is the honest answer. A real search of empty sky finds nothing, and this one tests itself every time with a hidden signal to prove it would have seen one.
A second look at the same piece, for signals that slide in frequency very fast, like something in a tight orbit. To the normal check those are a blur. The deep check adds neighbouring channels together until the blur becomes a line again, and tests itself with two hidden signals every time. It is for holders of the token.
Every recording is cut into pieces, and each piece is a square on the coverage map under the sky chart. The first wallet to check a square keeps its name on it for good. Holders can also choose which square to check. Everyone else gets a random one.
You sign a short message to prove the wallet is yours. It is not a payment, it costs nothing, and the site cannot move your funds.
Breakthrough Listen publishes what the telescope records: close to a petabyte, free to download.
Open Data ArchiveThe same kind of drift search the Berkeley team runs with turboSETI, written again for a graphics card in a browser.
turboSETI on GitHubThree published hits, with frequency, drift and strength. A search that misses them is not trusted.
The published resultOne chunk of real telescope data, searched on your own card in a fraction of a second.
Start Searching