A solution to continuous RFI in narrowband radio SETI with FAST: The MultiBeam Point-source Scanning strategy

Abstract

Narrowband radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the 21st century suffers severely from radio frequency interference (RFI), resulting in a high number of false positives, and it could be the major reason why we have not yet received any messages from space. We thereby propose a novel observation strategy, called MultiBeam Point-source Scanning (MBPS), to revolutionize the way RFI is identified in narrowband radio SETI and provide a prominent solution to the current situation. The MBPS strategy is a simple yet powerful method that sequentially scans over the target star with different beams of a telescope, hence creating real-time references in the time domain for cross-verification, thus potentially identifying all long-persistent RFI with a level of certainty never achieved in any previous attempts. By applying the MBPS strategy during the observation of TRAPPIST-1 with the FAST telescope, we successfully identified all 16,645 received signals as RFI using the solid criteria introduced by the MBPS strategy. Therefore we present the MBPS strategy as a promising tool that should bring us much closer to the first discovery of a genuine galactic greeting.

8 pages, 6 figures, published in The Astronomical Journal on Nov 15, 2023

References in corpus (11)

• The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) Project
• The Detectability and Characterization of the TRAPPIST-1 Exoplanet Atmospheres with JWST
• The Breakthrough Listen Search For Intelligent Life Near the Galactic Center I
• Analysis of the Breakthrough Listen signal of interest blc1 with a technosignature verification framework
• A deep-learning search for technosignatures of 820 nearby stars
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• Drift Rates of Narrowband Signals in Long-term SETI Observations for Exoplanets
• Multibeam Blind Search of Targeted SETI Observations toward 33 Exoplanet Systems with FAST
• Setigen: Simulating Radio Technosignatures for SETI
• A Green Bank Telescope search for narrowband technosignatures between 1.1-1.9 GHz during 12 Kepler planetary transits

Cited by in corpus (7)

• COSMIC's Large-Scale Search for Technosignatures during the VLA sky Survey: Survey Description and First Results
• Multibeam SETI Observations toward Nearby M dwarfs with FAST
• The FAST-SETI Milky Way Globular Cluster Survey I: A Pilot Multibeam On-the-Fly Search of Five Globular Clusters at L-Band
• Dual-Backend Multibeam Position Switching Targeted SETI Observations toward Nearby Active Planet-Hosting Systems with FAST
• Theoretical Radio Signals from Radio-Band Gravitational Waves Converted from the Neutron Star Magnetic Field
• Narrowband Radio Technosignature Search toward 3I/ATLAS with FAST
• An Improved Machine Learning Approach for Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation in FAST-SETI Survey Archival Data