SETI & Technosignatures

Sensitive Multi-beam Targeted SETI Observations Towards 33 Exoplanet Systems With FAST

By Keith Cowing
astro-ph.EP
August 4, 2022
Filed under
Sensitive Multi-beam Targeted SETI Observations Towards 33 Exoplanet Systems With FAST
33 observed targets in equatorial and galactic coordinates. The observable sky of FAST is the region between the green curves. Sources with planets in the habitable zones are denoted by blue symbols. Sources in the Earth transit zone are denoted by diamonds.

As a major approach to looking for life beyond the Earth, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is committed to detecting technosignatures such as engineered radio signals that are indicative of technologically capable life.

In this paper, we report a targeted SETI campaign employing an observation strategy named multi-beam coincidence matching (MBCM) at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) towards 33 known exoplanet systems, searching for ETI narrow-band drifting signals across 1.05-1.45 GHz in two orthogonal linear polarization directions separately.

A signal at 1140.604 MHz detected from the observation towards Kepler-438 originally peaked our interest because its features are roughly consistent with assumed ETI technosignatures.

However, evidences such as its polarization characteristics are almost able to eliminate the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin. Our observations achieve an unprecedented sensitivity since the minimum equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) we are able to detect reaches 1.48 x10^9 W.

Zhen-Zhao Tao, Hai-Chen Zhao, Tong-Jie Zhang, Vishal Gajjar, Yan Zhu, You-Ling Yue, Hai-Yan Zhang, Wen-Fei Liu, Shi-Yu Li, Jian-Chen Zhang, Cong Liu, Hong-Feng Wang, Ran Duan, Lei Qian, Cheng-Jin Jin, Di Li, Andrew Siemion, Peng Jiang, Dan Werthime, Jeff Cobb, Eric Korpela, David P. Anderson

Comments: 17 pages, 11 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2208.02421 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2208.02421v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.02421
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Submission history
From: Zhenzhao Tao
[v1] Thu, 4 Aug 2022 03:13:29 UTC (6,087 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02421
Astrobiology, SETI,

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻