5 research outputs found
A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
We conducted a search for narrowband radio signals over four observing
sessions in 2020-2023 with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m
diameter Green Bank Telescope. We pointed the telescope in the directions of 62
TESS Objects of Interest, capturing radio emissions from a total of ~11,680
stars and planetary systems in the ~9 arcminute beam of the telescope. All
detections were either automatically rejected or visually inspected and
confirmed to be of anthropogenic nature. In this work, we also quantified the
end-to-end efficiency of radio SETI pipelines with a signal injection and
recovery analysis. The UCLA SETI pipeline recovers 94.0% of the injected
signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98.7% of the
injections when regions of dense RFI are excluded. In another pipeline that
uses incoherent sums of 51 consecutive spectra, the recovery rate is ~15 times
smaller at ~6%. The pipeline efficiency affects calculations of transmitter
prevalence and SETI search volume. Accordingly, we developed an improved Drake
Figure of Merit and a formalism to place upper limits on transmitter prevalence
that take the pipeline efficiency and transmitter duty cycle into account.
Based on our observations, we can state at the 95% confidence level that fewer
than 6.6% of stars within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our
search (EIRP > 1e13 W). For stars within 20,000 ly, the fraction of stars with
detectable transmitters (EIRP > 5e16 W) is at most 3e-4. Finally, we showed
that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals detected with AI
techniques by Ma et al. (2023).Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to AJ, revise
Recommended from our members
A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15–1.73 GHz
Abstract:
We conducted a search for narrowband radio signals over four observing sessions in 2020–2023 with the L-band receiver (1.15–1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. We pointed the telescope in the directions of 62 TESS Objects of Interest, capturing radio emissions from a total of ∼11,680 stars and planetary systems in the ∼9′ beam of the telescope. All detections were either automatically rejected or visually inspected and confirmed to be of anthropogenic nature. We also quantified the end-to-end efficiency of radio SETI pipelines with a signal injection and recovery analysis. The UCLA SETI pipeline recovers 94.0% of the injected signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98.7% of the injections when regions of dense radio frequency interference are excluded. In another pipeline that uses incoherent sums of 51 consecutive spectra, the recovery rate is ∼15 times smaller at ∼6%. The pipeline efficiency affects calculations of transmitter prevalence and SETI search volume. Accordingly, we developed an improved Drake figure of merit and a formalism to place upper limits on transmitter prevalence that take the pipeline efficiency and transmitter duty cycle into account. Based on our observations, we can state at the 95% confidence level that fewer than 6.6% of stars within 100 pc host a transmitter that is continuously transmitting a narrowband signal with an equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) > 1013 W. For stars within 20,000 ly, the fraction of stars with detectable transmitters (EIRP > 5 × 1016 W) is at most 3 × 10−4. Finally, we showed that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals detected with AI techniques by Ma et al
Searches for Technosignatures: The State of the Profession
The small size of the SETI workforce is a major problem for NASA and the search for life elsewhere in the universe. The Astro2020 Decadal should address this issue by making nurturing the field an explicit priority for the next decade