Abstract: The Galactic Center (GC) is one of the most energetic regions with a plethora of exotic and extreme astrophysical objects. The line-of-sight toward the GC offers the largest integrated Galactic star and habitable planet count of any direction in the sky. With the Breakthrough Listen program, we have initiated one of the most sensitive and deep surveys ever conducted for a single target to search for evidence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (or technosignatures). We will discuss our observing strategies to search the large fraction of the observable radio window (i.e. 0.7 GHz to 93 GHz) using Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Parkes 'Murriyang' telescope to conduct 600 hours of deep observations. We will outline GPU-enabled signal search techniques utilizing state-of-the-art machine learning tools to look for three distinct types of likely technosignatures. The GC region is also expected to host around ~10^3 radio pulsars beaming towards Earth; however, none have been found so far. Among these, the discovery of a pulsar on a  ~1 yr orbit around SgrA* will lead to the high precision vetting of the theory of General Relativity in the strong-field regime. We will demonstrate how our survey is one of the most sensitive surveys that can also help us solve this "missing pulsars" problem. We will also discuss several ongoing ancillary studies enabled by our survey. These include studying GC magnetar -- J1745-2900 -- across a wide range of frequencies, searches of axion dark matter, blind search for complex organic molecules, and finding hyper-accelerated masers around GC. 

Astro Colloquium and 'coffee & cookies' Department gathering (3:45-4:00pm)

Please click the link to join: https://psu.zoom.us/j/92637070419