Periodic Radio Technosignature Search Toward 3I/ATLAS With FAST

[astro-ph.IM] 3I/ATLAS, the third confirmed interstellar object discovered in the Solar System, provides a unique opportunity for targeted technosignature searches.

We report a periodic radio technosignature search toward 3I/ATLAS using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) L-band multibeam receiver. To search for periodically modulated signals and distinguish center-beam-dominated candidates from multibeam radio-frequency interference, we apply canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) to the multibeam dynamic spectra.

CPD factorizes the multibeam data tensor into a set of separable components, with associated time, frequency, and beam signatures. Candidate components are then selected through periodogram and autocorrelation diagnostics.

We find no credible artificial periodic radio technosignature above 0.146 W is detected from the direction of 3I/ATLAS. This search expands the range of signal types explored for this target by including periodic modulated signal, and illustrates that CPD is a promising framework for multibeam periodic technosignature searches.

Jian-Kang Li, Zhen-Zhao Tao, Tong-Jie Zhang, Men-Quan Liu

Comments: 10 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.01666 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2607.01666v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.01666
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Submission history
From: Jiankang Li
[v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2026 03:45:45 UTC (11,086 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01666

Astrobiology,