Our Sky now and then $-$ searches for lost stars and impossible effects as probes of advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations

Abstract

Searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) using large survey data often look for possible signatures of astroengineering. We propose to search for physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology, by carrying out a search for disappearing galaxies and Milky Way stars. We select $\sim$ 10 million objects from USNO-B1.0 with low proper motion ($\mu$ $<$ 20 milli arcseconds / year) imaged on the sky in two epochs. We search for objects not found at the expected positions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) by visually examining images of $\sim$ 290 000 USNO-B1.0 objects with no counterpart in the SDSS. We identify some spurious targets in the USNO-B1.0. We find one candidate of interest for follow-up photometry, although it is very uncertain. If the candidate eventually is found, it defines the probability of observing a disappearing-object event the last decade to less than one in one million in the given samples. Nevertheless, since the complete USNO-B1.0 dataset is 100 times larger than any of our samples, we propose an easily accessible citizen science project in search of USNO-B1.0 objects which have disappeared from the SDSS.

Accepted to the Astronomical Journal

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