First SETI Observations with China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST)

Abstract

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) attempts to address the possibility of the presence of technological civilizations beyond the Earth. Benefiting from high sensitivity, large sky coverage, an innovative feed cabin for China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), we performed the SETI first observations with FAST's newly commisioned 19-beam receiver; we report preliminary results in this paper. Using the data stream produced by the SERENDIP VI realtime multibeam SETI spectrometer installed at FAST, as well as its off-line data processing pipelines, we identify and remove four kinds of radio frequency interference(RFI): zone, broadband, multi-beam, and drifting, utilizing the Nebula SETI software pipeline combined with machine learning algorithms. After RFI mitigation, the Nebula pipeline identifies and ranks interesting narrow band candidate ET signals, scoring candidates by the number of times candidate signals have been seen at roughly the same sky position and same frequency, signal strength, proximity to a nearby star or object of interest, along with several other scoring criteria. We show four example candidates groups that demonstrate these RFI mitigation and candidate selection. This preliminary testing on FAST data helps to validate our SETI instrumentation techniques as well as our data processing pipeline.

Estimating survival probability using the terrestrial extinction history for the search for extraterrestrial life

“…The six major mass extinction events 24,25 , the Ordovician-Silurian extinction at 443.8 Myr ago (O-S), the Late Devonian extinction at 372.2 Myr ago (F-F), the Capitanian extinction at 259.8 Myr ago (Cap), the Permian-Triassic extinction at 251.9 Myr ago (P-T), the Tiassic-Jurassic extinction at 201. 4 Myr ago (T-J), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction at 66 Myr ago (K-Pg), are clearly seen in Fig. 1 (top).…”

“…For example, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which is the international radio telescope project currently under development, will be capable of detecting leakage emissions from Earth-level civilizations within 100 pc 3 . Recently, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China has been conducting Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) observations 4 . Therefore, estimating the number of planets with extraterrestrial life in our Milky Way galaxy is important.…”

Can the China's fast telescope detect extraterrestrial von-Neumann probes?

“…China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), is dedicated to observe the sky in the frequency range 70 MHz − 3 GHz. Among others, one of the important missions of FAST is the SETI project (Lu et al 2020) and, recently, the collaboration has announced the first SETI observations (Zhang et al 2020, Li et al 2020. The aim of the present paper is to reexamine the results obtained by Osmanov (2020a,b) to consider the radio characteristics of the extraterrestrial von-Neumann self-replicators and discuss the problem in the context of observations performed by FAST.…”

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.…”