[Submitted on 4 Aug 2023]
Authors:Jean-Luc Margot, Megan G. Li, Pavlo Pinchuk, Nathan Myhrvold, Lea E. Alcantara, Megan T. Andrakin, Jeth Arunseangroj, Damien S. Baclet, Madison H. Belk, Zerxes R. Bhadha, Nicholas W. Brandis, Robert E. Carey, Harrison P. Cassar, Sai S. Chava, Calvin Chen, James Chen, Kellen T. Cheng, Alessia Cimbri, Benjamin Cloutier, Jordan A. Combitsis, Kelly L. Couvrette, Brandon P. Coy, Kyle W. Davis, Antoine F. Delcayre, Michelle R. Du, Sarah E. Feil, Danning Fu, Travis J. Gilmore, Emery Grahill-Bland, Laura M. Iglesias, Zoe Juneau, Anthony G. Karapetian, George Karfakis, Christopher T. Lambert, Eric A. Lazbin, Jian H. Li, Zhuofu (Chester)Li, Darren J. Lu, Detao Ma, Vedant Mathur, Mary H. Minasyan, Mark T. Nasielski, Janice T. Nguyen, Lorraine M. Nicholson, Divij Ohri, Atharva U. Padhye, Supreethi V. Penmetcha, Yugantar Prakash, Xinyi (Cindy)Qi, Vedant Sahu, Joshua A. Scally, Zefyr Scott, Trevor J. Seddon, Lara-Lynn V. Shohet, Anchal Sinha, Anthony E. Sinigiani, Jiuxu Song, Spencer M. Stice, Andria Uplisashvili, Krishna Vanga, Amaury G. Vazquez, George Vetushko, Valeria Villa, Maria Vincent, Ian J. Waasdorp, Ian B. Wagaman, Amanda Wang, Jade C. Wight, Ella Wong, Natsuko Yamaguchi, Zijin Zhang, Junyang Zhao, Ryan S. Lynch
Abstract: 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 ~11,860
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 SETI search volume calculations
as well as calculations of upper bounds on the number of transmitting
civilizations. We developed an improved Drake Figure of Merit for SETI search
volume calculations that includes the pipeline efficiency and frequency drift
rate coverage. Based on our observations, we found that there is a high
probability (94.0-98.7%) that fewer than ~0.014% of stars earlier than M8
within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP > 10e12
W). Finally, we showed that the UCLA SETI pipeline natively detects the signals
detected with AI techniques by Ma et al., 2023.
