Technosignatures are any measurable property that may provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a branch of astrobiology that focuses on finding technosignatures, as their detection would provide evidence for intelligent life beyond Earth. Traditionally, targeted radio surveys have been the mainstay of SETI research, and many SETI projects currently underway still take place in the radio band. The newly-proposed technique, the SETI Ellipsoid, is a strategy for technosignature candidate selection that assumes that extraterrestrial civilizations who have observed a galactic-scale event — such as supernova SN 1987A — may use it as a point to broadcast synchronized signals indicating their presence.
Dr. Bárbara Cabrales from the SETI Institute and the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues show the SETI Ellipsoid method can leverage continuous, wide-field sky surveys, significantly enhancing our ability to detect potential technosignatures.
By compensating for the uncertainties in the estimated time-of-arrival of such signals using observations that span up to a year, they implement the SETI Ellipsoid strategy in an innovative way using state-of-the-arc technology.
“New surveys of the sky provide groundbreaking opportunities to search for technosignatures coordinated with supernovae,” Dr. Cabrales said.
“The typical timing uncertainties involved are of a couple months, so we want to cover our bases by finding targets that are well-documented over the course of about a year.”
“In addition to that, it’s important to have as many observations as possible for each target of interest, so that we can determine what looks like normal behavior and what might look like a potential technosignature.”
In examining data from the continuous viewing zone of NASA’s TESS mission, covering 5% of all TESS data from the first three years of the…
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