SETI & Technosignatures

COSMIC’s Large-Scale Search for Technosignatures during the VLA sky Survey: Survey Description and First Results

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.IM
January 31, 2025
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COSMIC’s Large-Scale Search for Technosignatures during the VLA sky Survey: Survey Description and First Results
A plot in galactic coordinates of all the coordinates currently in the database observed from 29 March 2023 to 14 July 2024. The orange points represent data from frequencies below 4 GHz and the blue points are from data collected above 4 GHz. — astro-ph.IM

Developing algorithms to search through data efficiently is a challenging part of searching for signs of technology beyond our solar system.

We have built a digital signal processing system and computer cluster on the backend of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico in order to search for signals throughout the Galaxy consistent with our understanding of artificial radio emissions. In our first paper, we described the system design and software pipelines.

In this paper, we describe a postprocessing pipeline to identify persistent sources of interference, filter out false positives, and search for signals not immediately identifiable as anthropogenic radio frequency interference during the VLA Sky Survey.

As of 01 September 2024, the Commensal Open-source Multi-mode Interferometric Cluster had observed more than 950,000 unique pointings. This paper presents the strategy we employ when commensally observing during the VLA Sky Survey and a postprocessing strategy for the data collected during the survey.

To test this postprocessing pipeline, we searched toward 511 stars from the Gaia catalog with coherent beams. This represents about 30 minutes of observation during VLASS, where we typically observe about 2000 sources per hour in the coherent beamforming mode. We did not detect any unidentifiable signals, setting isotropic power limits ranging from 1011 to 1016W.

Chenoa D. Tremblay, Jared Sofair, Lucy Steffes, Talon Myburgh, Daniel Czech, Paul B. Demorest, Ross A. Donnachie, Alex W. Pollak, Mark Ruzindana, Andrew P.V. Siemion, Savin S. Varghese, Sofia Sheikh

Comments: 17 Pages, Accepted in AJ
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2501.17997 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2501.17997v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.17997
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Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ad9ea5
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Submission history
From: Chenoa Tremblay
[v1] Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:10:42 UTC (4,101 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17997
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) 🖖🏻