A VERITAS/Breakthrough Listen Search for Optical Technosignatures
Abstract
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is conducting a program using multiple telescopes around the world to search for "technosignatures": artificial transmitters of extraterrestrial origin from beyond our solar system. The VERITAS Collaboration joined this program in 2018, and provides the capability to search for one particular technosignature: optical pulses of a few nanoseconds duration detectable over interstellar distances. We report here on the analysis and results of dedicated VERITAS observations of Breakthrough Listen targets conducted in 2019 and 2020 and of archival VERITAS data collected since 2012. Thirty hours of dedicated observations of 136 targets and 249 archival observations of 140 targets were analyzed and did not reveal any signals consistent with a technosignature. The results are used to place limits on the fraction of stars hosting transmitting civilizations. We also discuss the minimum-pulse sensitivity of our observations and present VERITAS observations of CALIOP: a space-based pulsed laser onboard the CALIPSO satellite. The detection of these pulses with VERITAS, using the analysis techniques developed for our technosignature search, allows a test of our analysis efficiency and serves as an important proof-of-principle.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2306.17680,
title = {A VERITAS/Breakthrough Listen Search for Optical Technosignatures},
author = {Atreya Acharyya and Colin Adams and Avery Archer and Priyadarshini Bangale and Pedro Batista and Wystan Benbow and Aryeh Brill and M Capasso and Manel Errando and Abraham Falcone and Qi Feng and John Finley and Gregory Foote and Lucy Fortson and Amy Furniss and Sean Griffin and William Hanlon and David Hanna and Olivier Hervet and Claire Hinrichs and John Hoang and Jamie Holder and T. Humensky and Weidong Jin and Philip Kaaret and Mary P. Kertzman and Maria Kherlakian and David Kieda and Tobias Kleiner and Nikolas Korzoun and Sajan Kumar and Mark Lang and Matthew Lundy and Gernot Maier and Conor McGrath and Matthew Millard and Hayden Miller and John Millis and Connor Mooney and Patrick Moriarty and Reshmi Mukherjee and Stephan O'Brien and Rene A. Ong and Martin Pohl and Elisa Pueschel and John Quinn and Kenneth J. Ragan and Paul Reynolds and Deivid Ribeiro and Emmet Thomas Roache and Jamie Ryan and Iftach Sadeh and Lab Saha and Marcos Santander and Glenn H Sembroski and Ruo Shang and Donggeun Tak and Anjana Talluri and James Tucci and Nico Vazquez and David Williams and Sam Wong and Jooyun Woo and David DeBoer and Howard Isaacson and Imke de Pater and Danny Price and Andrew Siemion},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.17680},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
15 pages, 7 figures