SETI & Technosignatures

Signal Synchronization Strategies And Time Domain SETI With Gaia DR3

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.IM
August 3, 2023
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Signal Synchronization Strategies And Time Domain SETI With Gaia DR3
Seto scheme crossing time diagram with SN 1054 as the source event. This scheme covers half the sky, centered at SN 1054, with two rings, one expanding with time and one contracting. The contour lines show the progression of these two rings. For SN 1054, the search window closes at around the year 3620, corresponding to a normal time of √ 2 βˆ’ 1. — astro-ph.IM

Spatiotemporal techniques for signal coordination with actively transmitting extraterrestrial civilizations, without the need for prior communication, can constrain technosignature searches to a significantly smaller coordinate space.

With the variable star catalog from Gaia Data Release 3, we explore two related signaling strategies: the SETI Ellipsoid, and that proposed by Seto, which are both based on the synchronization of transmissions with a conspicuous astrophysical event. This dataset contains more than 10 million variable star candidates with light curves from the first three years of Gaia’s operational phase, between 2014 and 2017.

Using four different historical supernovae as source events, we find that less than 0.01% of stars in the sample have crossing times, the times at which we would expect to receive synchronized signals on Earth, within the date range of available Gaia observations. For these stars, we present a framework for technosignature analysis that searches for modulations in the variability parameters by splitting the stellar light curve at the crossing time.

Andy Nilipour, James R. A. Davenport, Steve Croft, Andrew P. V. Siemion

Comments: 22 pages, 13 figures, published in AJ
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2308.00066 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2308.00066v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Journal reference: 2023 AJ 166 79
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/acde79
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Submission history
From: Andy Nilipour
[v1] Mon, 31 Jul 2023 18:37:20 UTC (14,949 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00066
Astrobiology,

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) πŸ––πŸ»