An international team of researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and several universities have been scanning exoplanets for signs of technological activity (also known as “technosignatures”).
The researchers found no clear signs of technological signatures, but they did identify two radio signals of interest that require follow-up. This new technique could greatly expand the field of SETI and create all sorts of opportunities for future research. The team was led by Sophia Z. Sheikh, a graduate student at the SETI Institute and the SETI Research Center at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and other members of the Pennsylvania State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETIC) SETI Alumni program. They were joined by teams from Breakthrough Listen, the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds (CEHW), the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), and several universities and research institutes.
An article detailing their research is expected to be published The astronomical journal.
“Traditional SETI radio is expanding exponentially, new sources of funding are emerging, and new radio telescopes (e.g. MeerKAT) are emerging. Furthermore, many new scientists are involved in this field, including both students and experts in other fields, who are applying their expertise to solve the technological signature problem. It is very exciting to be a part of SETI at such a dynamic moment in time,” Sheikh said.
However, finding evidence for the existence of man-made radio signals remains a challenging task, requiring powerful arrays, significant observation times, and enormous effort and patience on the part of research teams. Additionally, there is growing concern among SETI researchers that much of the research space is still unexplored.
According to Shaikh and his team, this creates an opportunity to create new designs that could fill the unexplored areas of the “parameter space”: to get our attention, the space is huge and there are so many shapes a message can take . Thus, it will be helpful if we try to find out specific places, times or frequencies that may be more likely places for messages than any random point.
For their study, Sheikh and his colleagues took data from 12 exoplanets identified by the Kepler space telescope. The goal was to see if the radio transmissions matched these transits, which is a sure sign that an advanced civilization is trying to communicate.
“For this particular project, we used planetary transit centers as Schelling points. In other words, we timed our observations so that the exoplanet of interest is aligned with its parent star and solar system. That’s the time we know about it (by looking at the dip in brightness as the planet passes in front of its star), and it’s the time any potential life on the exoplanet would know it too, so it’s “mutually derivable,” Sheikh said.
The scientists noted that this was a pilot study on the idea of transits as Schelling points, and future studies will expand the sample to include significantly more exoplanets.
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