[astro-ph.EP] Building on Arkhipov’s proposal that technogenic artefacts may survive natural interstellar transport and accumulate on airless Solar System bodies, we examine the prospects for identifying micron-scale engineered particulate material within the lunar regolith.
We analyse the transport of micron and submicron grains through the interstellar medium, including gas drag, sputtering, and ISM phase-dependent survival, and show that refractory particles with characteristic radii of order 0.3 microns may traverse kiloparsec scales over residence times of 0.1-1 Gyr.
Solar radiation pressure and heliospheric filtering define a dynamically constrained slow-arrival channel in which a small fraction of grains reach the Earth-Moon system at relative velocities compatible with survival upon impact.
Combining these properties with regolith-mixing constraints yields quantitative upper limits on the cumulative undirected technomaterial output of large-scale spacefaring civilisations: a null detection in a cubic metre of regolith excludes scenarios in which Solar-type stars typically disperse more than approximately 0.09 Earth mass equivalents of long-lived artificial particulate debris over Galactic history.
Deliberate targeting of the inner Solar System with artificial particulate matter defines a complementary regime characterised by the visitation frequency and deposited mass of such releases, for which the probabilities of detection may be orders of magnitude higher.
We outline a multi-modal detection strategy integrating machine-vision triage with laboratory forensic techniques to identify anomalous grains within a well-characterised natural background.
Particulate technosignatures thus establish an experimentally accessible form of exo-archaeology, capable of placing meaningful constraints — and, in favourable cases, yielding direct material evidence — of the Galaxy’s technological history.
Lewis J. Pinault, Brian C. Lacki, Ian A. Crawford, Andrew P. V. Siemion
Comments: Submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology on 10 March 2026; currently under review. v3 further reconciles used/unused references, and provides additional and correctly matched doi insertions
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.24028 [astro-ph.EP](or arXiv:2606.24028v3 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.24028
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Submission history
From: Lewis Pinault
[v1] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:07:50 UTC (2,423 KB)
[v2] Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:49:50 UTC (2,426 KB)
[v3] Wed, 1 Jul 2026 16:25:31 UTC (2,428 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24028
Astrobiology, Nanotechnology, SynBio, SETI, Technosignatures,
