Prospects for Astrobiology And Technosignature Searches With The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey Of Space And Time

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will map sources in multiband colour–variability space.

We present a prototype coherence-based framework for astrobiology and technosignature searches, in which candidates are treated as structured departures from natural astrophysical manifolds rather than isolated photometric outliers.

We illustrate the framework with three simulated cases: five Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) surface/activity states, a grid of 649 synthetic exoplanet spectra with vegetation-red-edge-like (VRE) perturbations, and 500 synthetic multiband light curves, each projected into LSST-like observable space and analysed through colour geometry, chromatic variability, and cross-band coherence.

Key results include a full-colour Mahalanobis distance D≈5.1 for the weak-coma KBO state (∼5σ in the five-dimensional colour vector), an indicative VRE coherence threshold at fcrit≈0.13, and an idealised stacking forecast reaching 5σ under optimistic assumptions.

We show, using a small Gaia~DR3 stellar sample, that stellar colour and photometric stability may inform the prioritisation of Galactic regions for applying such coherence diagnostics.

Andjelka B Kovacevic, Nigel J. Mason, Aleksandra Ciprijanovic, Becky Long, Dominika Korczakowska, Maia Moore, Juulia Voulukka

Comments: submitted to Advancing the Search for Technosignatures, Proceedings of IAU Symposium #404 (forthcoming)
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
Report number: FERMILAB-CONF-26-0344-CSAID
Cite as: arXiv:2606.00574 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2606.00574v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.00574
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Submission history
From: Andjelka Kovacevic
[v1] Sat, 30 May 2026 06:54:13 UTC (5,444 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00574

Astrobiology