A Search for Technosignatures Around 11,680 Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz
Creators: name: Margot, Jean-Luc
name: Li, Megan G.
name: Pinchuk, Pavlo
name: Myhrvold, Nathan
name: Lesyna, Larry
name: Alcantara, Lea E.
name: Andrakin, Megan T.
name: Arunseangroj, Jeth
name: Baclet, Damien S.
name: Belk, Madison H.
name: Bhadha, Zerxes R.
name: Brandis, Nicholas W.
name: Carey, Robert E.
name: Cassar, Harrison P.
name: Chava, Sai S.
name: Chen, Calvin
name: Chen, James
name: Cheng, Kellen T.
name: Cimbri, Alessia
name: Cloutier, Benjamin
name: Combitsis, Jordan A.
name: Couvrette, Kelly L.
name: Coy, Brandon P.
name: Davis, Kyle W.
name: Delcayre, Antoine F.
name: Du, Michelle R.
name: Feil, Sarah E.
name: Fu, Danning
name: Gilmore, Travis J.
name: Grahill-Bland, Emery
name: Iglesias, Laura M.
name: Juneau, Zoe
name: Karapetian, Anthony G.
name: Karfakis, George
name: Lambert, Christopher T.
name: Lazbin, Eric A.
name: Li, Jian H.
name: Zhuofu
name: Li
name: Liskij, Nicholas M.
name: Lopilato, Anthony V.
name: Lu, Darren J.
name: Ma, Detao
name: Mathur, Vedant
name: Minasyan, Mary H.
name: Muller, Maxwell K.
name: Nasielski, Mark T.
name: Nguyen, Janice T.
name: Nicholson, Lorraine M.
name: Niemoeller, Samantha
name: Ohri, Divij
name: Padhye, Atharva U.
name: Penmetcha, Supreethi V.
name: Prakash, Yugantar
name: Xinyi
name: Qi
name: Rindt, Liam
name: Sahu, Vedant
name: Scally, Joshua A.
name: Scott, Zefyr
name: Seddon, Trevor J.
name: Shohet, Lara-Lynn V.
name: Sinha, Anchal
name: Sinigiani, Anthony E.
name: Song, Jiuxu
name: Stice, Spencer M.
name: Uplisashvili, Andria
name: Vanga, Krishna
name: Vazquez, Amaury G.
name: Vetushko, George
name: Villa, Valeria
name: Vincent, Maria
name: Waasdorp, Ian J.
name: Wagaman, Ian B.
name: Wang, Amanda
name: Wight, Jade C.
name: Wong, Ella
name: Yamaguchi, Natsuko
name: Zhang, Zijin
name: Zhao, Junyang
name: Lynch, Ryan S.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We conducted a search for narrowband radio signals over four observing sessions in 2020-2023 with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. We pointed the telescope in the directions of 62 TESS Objects of Interest, capturing radio emissions from a total of ~11,680 stars and planetary systems in the ~9 arcminute beam of the telescope. All detections were either automatically rejected or visually inspected and confirmed to be of anthropogenic nature. In this work, we also quantified the end-to-end efficiency of radio SETI pipelines with a signal injection and recovery analysis. The UCLA SETI pipeline recovers 94.0% of the injected signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98.7% of the injections when regions of dense RFI are excluded. In another pipeline that uses incoherent sums of 51 consecutive spectra, the recovery rate is ~15 times smaller at ~6%. The pipeline efficiency affects calculations of transmitter prevalence and SETI search volume. Accordingly, we developed an improved Drake Figure of Merit and a formalism to place upper limits on transmitter prevalence that take the pipeline efficiency and transmitter duty cycle into account. Based on our observations, we can state at the 95% confidence level that fewer than 6.6% of stars within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP &gt; 1e13 W). For stars within 20,000 ly, the fraction of stars with detectable transmitters (EIRP &gt; 5e16 W) is at most 3e-4. Finally, we showed that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals detected with AI techniques by Ma et al. (2023).
description: 21 pages, 9 figures, in press at AJ