A Dual-Burst Geometrical Prescription For Concurrent Signaling

by Keith CowingJuly 22, 2026July 22, 2026

Schematic illustration of the dual-burst virtual-emission prescription. Two distant bursts, A and B, are observed by the receiver, here taken to be the Solar System, at times tA and tB, and are represented by approximately planar wavefronts associated with the unit source directions bˆA and bˆB. Each local encounter of the two wavefronts defines a reference event of the prescription. The encounter shown here is only a representative example; in three-dimensional space, the set of such encounters forms a two-dimensional surface. Isotropic outgoing virtual rays are assigned to these reference events. A possible transmitter located on one such ray may emit an artificial signal along that virtual ray. For an observing time T = tB + τ , a receiver applies the same prescription to determine the corresponding arrival directions nˆ on the sky, forming the search ring derived in Section 2. In the plane-wave approximation, this construction depends only on the two burst directions and their observed arrival times, not on the distances to the bursts, to the transmitter, or to any Galactic spatial anchor. -- [astro-ph.IM]

[astro-ph.IM] We propose a dual-burst implementation of concurrent signaling for technosignature searches.

Concurrent signaling is a Schelling-point prescription for implicit coordination between transmitters and receivers without prior communication, using salient astronomical phenomena as coordination anchors. It allows possible transmitters at different line-of-sight distances to be searched collectively through a time-dependent locus on the sky.

In the dual-burst implementation, the coordination anchors are two cosmological transients. At a chosen observing time after the later burst, the leading geometrical prescription specifies a precisely defined sky ring from the two burst directions and their observed arrival times at the receiver.

No distance to either burst, to a candidate transmitter, or to a Galactic spatial anchor is required to construct this angular search locus. The finite width of the ring is therefore controlled primarily by burst localization rather than by an astrophysical distance scale, thereby reducing the set of sky directions to be searched.

Naoki Seto

Comments: 6 pages
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.27664 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2606.27664v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27664
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Submission history
From: Naoki Seto
[v1] Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:51:24 UTC (320 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27664

Astrobiology, SETI, Technosignature,

Keith Cowing

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... More by Keith Cowing