As a major approach to looking for life beyond the Earth, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is committed to detecting technosignatures such as engineered radio signals that are indicative of technologically capable life. In this paper, we report a targeted SETI campaign employing an observation strategy named multi-beam coincidence matching (MBCM) at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) towards 33 known exoplanet systems, searching for ETI narrow-band drifting signals across 1.05-1.45 GHz in two orthogonal linear polarization directions separately. A signal at 1140.604 MHz detected from the observation towards Kepler-438 originally peaked our interest because its features are roughly consistent with assumed ETI technosignatures. However, evidences such as its polarization characteristics are almost able to eliminate the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin. Our observations achieve an unprecedented sensitivity since the minimum equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) we are able to detect reaches 1.48 x10^9 W.
@article{arxiv.2208.02421,
title = {Sensitive Multi-beam Targeted SETI Observations towards 33 Exoplanet Systems with FAST},
author = {Zhen-Zhao Tao and Hai-Chen Zhao and Tong-Jie Zhang and Vishal Gajjar and Yan Zhu and You-Ling Yue and Hai-Yan Zhang and Wen-Fei Liu and Shi-Yu Li and Jian-Chen Zhang and Cong Liu and Hong-Feng Wang and Ran Duan and Lei Qian and Cheng-Jin Jin and Di Li and Andrew Siemion and Peng Jiang and Dan Werthime and Jeff Cobb and Eric Korpela and David P. Anderson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.02421},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
17 pages, 12 figures, matches the published version