The UCLA SETI Group's radio search for technosignatures

PSETI Seminar
October 21, 2021
Jean-Luc Margot

Abstract:
Searches for biosignatures and technosignatures are designed to find evidence of life elsewhere, and it is not clear which strategy will provide unambiguous evidence first. What is clear is that the volume of the Galaxy that can be sampled with a search for radio technosignatures is millions of times larger than the relatively small, local bubble conducive to the search for biosignatures. Since 2016, the UCLA SETI Group has been conducting a search for narrowband radio technosignatures with the largest fully steerable telescope on Earth. We have sampled over 36,000 stars with known parallaxes and detected over 56 million candidate signals. In terms of the number of SNR>10-detections per unit bandwidth per unit integration time, our search is 150-200 times more efficient than some of the recent searches conducted by the Breakthrough Listen team. In 2020, our group was awarded a grant from the NASA Exoplanet Research Program to expand our search and develop a signal injection and recovery analysis tool, which is required to place meaningful upper limits on the prevalence of certain extraterrestrial transmitters. I will describe our algorithms and results to date, including a machine learning application that reduces the number of candidate signals that require human evaluation by a factor of ~16. Our search has been tightly coupled to the annual UCLA SETI course, which is perhaps the first full-length SETI course in a university setting, and which has exposed 100+ undergraduate students and 10+ graduate students to SETI science in six offerings since 2016.