Artist's impression (credit Danielle Futselaar / Breakthrough Listen) of the Green Bank Telescope gathering data on the center of the Milky Way. The inset image shows the black hole at our Galaxy's center, and a nearby candidate (unconfirmed) pulsar.
Researchers from Columbia University and Breakthrough Listen have published new results from the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey, one of the most sensitive radio searches ever conducted for pulsars toward the dynamically complex central region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The study, led by recent PhD graduate Dr. Karen I. Perez, has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
You can read more about the search in this non-technical summary or in the technical paper. You can also download the accompanying artwork (Credit: Breakthrough Listen / Danielle Futselaar).
If you have the requisite technical background, we invite you to download the datasets if you wish to explore them or to perform your own analyses. The individual files used in the pulsar search are between 3 and 8 TB in size; scans from shorter (5-minute) observations are also available.
Much of our software is publicly available, including blimpy (a tool for loading filterbank, hdf5, and raw format data files), turboSETI (a tool for performing Doppler drift searches), and SPANDAK (a tool for searching for dispersed transient signals).