A Green Bank Telescope search for narrowband technosignatures between 1.1-1.9 GHz during 12 Kepler planetary transits

Abstract

A growing avenue for determining the prevalence of life beyond Earth is to search for "technosignatures" from extraterrestrial intelligences/agents. Technosignatures require significant energy to be visible across interstellar space and thus intentional signals might be concentrated in frequency, in time, or in space, to be found in mutually obvious places. Therefore, it could be advantageous to search for technosignatures in parts of parameter space that are mutually-derivable to an observer on Earth and a distant transmitter. In this work, we used the L-band (1.1-1.9 GHz) receiver on the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to perform the first technosignature search pre-synchronized with exoplanet transits, covering 12 Kepler systems. We used the Breakthrough Listen turboSETI pipeline to flag narrowband hits ($\sim$3 Hz) using a maximum drift rate of $\pm$614.4 Hz/s and a signal-to-noise threshold of 5 - the pipeline returned $\sim 3.4\times 10^5$ apparently-localized features. Visual inspection by a team of citizen scientists ruled out 99.6% of them. Further analysis found 2 signals-of-interest that warrant follow-up, but no technosignatures. If the signals-of-interest are not re-detected in future work, it will imply that the 12 targets in the search are not producing transit-aligned signals from 1.1-1.9 GHz with transmitter powers $>$60 times that of the former Arecibo radar. This search debuts a range of innovative technosignature techniques: citizen science vetting of potential signals-of-interest, a sensitivity-aware search out to extremely high drift rates, a more flexible method of analyzing on-off cadences, and an extremely low signal-to-noise threshold.

arXiv comment18 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (32)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package
• The NASA Exoplanet Archive: Data and Tools for Exoplanet Research
• False positive probabilties for all Kepler Objects of Interest: 1284 newly validated planets and 428 likely false positives
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: 1.1-1.9 GHz observations of 692 Nearby Stars
• Kepler-445, Kepler-446 and the Occurrence of Compact Multiples Orbiting Mid-M Dwarf Stars
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars over 1.10-3.45 GHz
• A 1.1 to 1.9 GHz SETI Survey of the Kepler Field: I. A Search for Narrow-band Emission from Select Targets
• The Case and Context for Atmospheric Methane as an Exoplanet Biosignature
• How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-Dimensional Cosmic Haystack
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A Wideband Data Recorder System for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction and Archiving
• SETI Observations of Exoplanets with the Allen Telescope Array
• The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC 8462852
• The Case for Technosignatures: Why They May Be Abundant, Long-lived, Highly Detectable, and Unambiguous
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A 3.95-8.00 GHz Search for Radio Technosignatures in the Restricted Earth Transit Zone
• Choosing a Maximum Drift Rate in a SETI Search: Astrophysical Considerations
• Analysis of the Breakthrough Listen signal of interest blc1 with a technosignature verification framework
• A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets
• A Search for Technosignatures Around 31 Sun-like Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
• A radio technosignature search towards Proxima Centauri resulting in a signal-of-interest
• Single Pulse Detection Algorithms for Real-time Fast Radio Burst Searches using GPUs
• Searching for pulsars associated with polarised point sources using LOFAR: Initial discoveries from the TULIPP project
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Technosignature Search of Transiting TESS Targets of Interest
• The Application of Autocorrelation SETI Search Techniques in an ATA Survey
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Searching Boyajian's Star for Laser Line Emission
• Intermittent Signals and Planetary Days in SETI
• The Pulsar Search Collaboratory: Current Status and Future Prospects
• Synchronized SETI - The Case for "Opposition"
• Planck Frequencies as Schelling Points in SETI
• A Search for Radio Technosignatures at the Solar Gravitational Lens Targeting Alpha Centauri

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Technosignature Search of 97 Nearby Galaxies
• A Radio Technosignature Search of TRAPPIST-1 with the Allen Telescope Array
• Earth Detecting Earth: At what distance could Earth's constellation of technosignatures be detected with present-day technology?
• A solution to continuous RFI in narrowband radio SETI with FAST: The MultiBeam Point-source Scanning strategy
• Detecting Extraterrestrial Civilizations That Employ an Earth-level Deep Space Network
• Breakthrough Listen: A Technosignature Search Around 27 Eclipsing Exoplanets Selected from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Catalogue