Opportunities to search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the FAST

Abstract

The discovery of ubiquitous habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, has ushered in a renaissance in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Large scale SETI activities are now underway at numerous international facilities. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is the largest single-aperture radio telescope in the world, well positioned to conduct sensitive searches for radio emission indicative of exo-intelligence. SETI is one of the five key science goals specified in the original FAST project plan. A collaboration with the Breakthrough Listen Initiative has been initiated in 2016 with a joint statement signed both by Dr. Jun Yan, the then director of the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), and Dr. Peter Worden, the Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In this paper, we highlight some of the unique features of FAST that will allow for novel SETI observations. We identify and describe three different signal types indicative of a technological source, namely, narrow-band, wide-band artificially dispersed, and modulated signals. We here propose observations with FAST to achieve sensitivities never before explored.

FAST: Its Scientific Achievements and Prospects

“…This is a serious scientific goal of FAST from the design phase and has been included in current surveys. 18 Recently, the first SETI observation using FAST was reported, 19 marking FAST as a powerful machine in SETI signal searching.…”

A SETI survey of the Vela region using the Murchison Widefield Array: Orders of magnitude expansion in search space

“…Tremblay et al 2018). The FAST collaboration intends to complete commensal and dedicated SETI experiments, using a real-time data processing pipeline originally developed for the SETI@Home platform to search for technosignatures from 1 to 1.5 GHz during normal science operations (Zhang et al 2020;Li et al 2020). Similar ideas exist for commensal searches being planned with MeerKAT (Gajjar et al 2019).…”

The most sensitive SETI observation by multi-beam coincidence matching strategy towards exoplanet systems

“…In spite of this, our work verifies that compared to single-beam on-off strategy, MBCM greatly improves both time efficiency and radio frequency interference (RFI) identification effectiveness of targeted SETI observations. With an enormous collecting area (illuminated aperture of 300 m), a large sky region coverage (−14 • to +66 • in declination) and the cryogenically-cooled L-band 19-beam receiver (system temperature of ∼20 K), FAST [18][19][20] is well positioned to conduct highly sensitive and efficient searches for ETI technosignatures 21 , and SETI is one of the five key science goals specified in the original FAST project plan 22 . In 2019, the first commensal SETI survey by FAST was per-formed and two groups of candidate signals were detected 23 .…”

“…Using turboSETI 29 , a software package for targeted SETI, we search our data for narrow band drifting signals across a frequency range of 1.05 − 1.45 GHz (FAST L-band) 18,20,21 . The narrow band signals detected above the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) threshold (taken as 10 in this work) are referred to as 'hits' [13][14][15]17 , and hits that detected only by the target beam (beam 1) but not by any of the reference beams (beam 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18) are referred to as 'events'.…”

“…The sensitivity of radio SETI observations can be measured by equivalent isotropic radiated power(EIRP) 13,14,17,21 , defined as…”