A search for technosignatures from 14 planetary systems in the Kepler field with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz

Abstract

Analysis of Kepler mission data suggests that the Milky Way includes billions of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of their host star. Current technology enables the detection of technosignatures emitted from a large fraction of the Galaxy. We describe a search for technosignatures that is sensitive to Arecibo-class transmitters located within ~420 ly of Earth and transmitters that are 1000 times more effective than Arecibo within ~13 000 ly of Earth. Our observations focused on 14 planetary systems in the Kepler field and used the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. Each source was observed for a total integration time of 5 minutes. We obtained power spectra at a frequency resolution of 3 Hz and examined narrowband signals with Doppler drift rates between +/-9 Hz/s. We flagged any detection with a signal-to-noise ratio in excess of 10 as a candidate signal and identified approximately 850 000 candidates. Most (99%) of these candidate signals were automatically classified as human-generated radio-frequency interference (RFI). A large fraction (>99%) of the remaining candidate signals were also flagged as anthropogenic RFI because they have frequencies that overlap those used by global navigation satellite systems, satellite downlinks, or other interferers detected in heavily polluted regions of the spectrum. All 19 remaining candidate signals were scrutinized and none were attributable to an extraterrestrial source.

arXiv comment15 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars over 1.10-3.45 GHz
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction and Archiving
• Choosing a Maximum Drift Rate in a SETI Search: Astrophysical Considerations
• A Search for Technosignatures Around 31 Sun-like Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
• A search for technosignatures from TRAPPIST-1, LHS 1140, and 10 planetary systems in the Kepler field with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
• A Machine-Learning-Based Direction-of-Origin Filter for the Identification of Radio Frequency Interference in the Search for Technosignatures
• Setigen: Simulating Radio Technosignatures for SETI
• A 4-8 GHz Galactic Center Search for Periodic Technosignatures
• A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
• Unbound Close Stellar Encounters in the Solar Neighborhood
• Earth through the looking glass: how frequently are we detected by other civilisations through photometric microlensing?
• The radio search for technosignatures in the decade 2020-2030