The world's premiere single-dish radio telescope is part of the Green Bank Observatory. The GBT's sensitivity in the millimeter to meter wavelength is very high to extremely high. It has become one of the main instruments used by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
An international team of researchers scanned twelve exoplanets for signs of technological activity. They timed their observations to coincide with the planets transiting in front of the sun. The survey didn't find any conclusive evidence of technosignatures, but they did find two radio signals of interest. The field of SETI could be vastly expanded by this technique.
The leader of the team was a graduate student with the SETI Institute and Berkeley SETI Research Center. They were joined by teams from the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, and multiple universities. The paper detailing their research is going to be published.
Since 1961, the SETI convention has been searching for radio signals. The Project Ozma was led by Frank Drake and was named after him. In recent years, the field of SETI has expanded considerably, with next- generation radio telescopes and new data analysis techniques. The types of technosignatures that researchers could look for are growing.
Radio transmissions remain the most sought after technosignature, and radio surveys have advanced greatly thanks to newly developed hardware and cutting-edge computational techniques. Sheikh sent an email to Universe Today.
She said that traditional radio SETI is expanding with new sources of funding. Many new scientists are getting involved in the field, as well as students and experts who are applying their skills to the technosignature challenge. It is very exciting to be a part of SETI.
It's not easy to find evidence of artificial radio signals. There is a concern among SETI researchers that the majority of search space is still unexplored. According to Sheikh and her team, this gives them the chance to mount new projects that could fill the unexplored regions.
“The classic problem with SETI is the “needle in a haystack” issue – even if someone is trying their hardest to get our attention, space is big, and there are so many forms that a message could take (even if you just restrict the possibility space, or parameter space, to the radio spectrum). So it helps if we try to figure out special places, times, or frequencies that might be more likely locations for messages than any random point.”
chelling points are a concept from game theory where two or more people arrive at the same solution by default and without communication There are places where SETI researchers believe civilizations are most likely to be found. The 21-centimeter line is also known as the "hydrogen" or "21-centimeter line." SETI researchers like the fact that radio waves can penetrate large clouds of dust in the ISM.
Sheikh and her colleagues looked at the data on the exoplanets. The planets were found using transit photometry. In transit photometry, periodic dips in a star's luminosity are used to confirm the existence of exoplanets. The data was gathered on these exoplanets as they transited their stars. The goal was to see if radio transmissions coincide with the transits. It was said by Sheikh.
“For this particular project, we used the centers of planetary transits as Schelling Points. In other words, we timed our observations such that the exoplanet-of-interest was lined up with its host star and the solar system. That’s a time that we know (by observing the dip in brightness as the planet passes in front of its star), and it’s a time that any potential life on the exoplanet would also know – therefore, it is “mutually derivable”.”
The method narrows the transmission down to a specific window of time. The costs of sending messages to space are greatly reduced by this. Sheikh and her colleagues are the first to use this method. They did not detect any technosignatures, but they did establish a procedure that will make it easier to conduct surveys in the future.
She said that future research will expand the sample to include more exoplanets. Knowing exactly when and where to look will help us prioritize potentially real signals over the growing background of radio.
ArXiv is further reading.
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