On January 6, 2020, UCLA graduate student Paul Pinchuk and I gave talks at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which included a special session titled "Astrobiology and the Search for Intelligent Life in the 2020s" that had approximately 100 people in the audience. I described the results of the first part of our search around solar-type stars near the plane of the Galaxy (abstract here), and Paul described improvements to our data-processing pipeline (abstract here).
Our talks at the AAS meeting highlighted some of the characteristics of our search. Although modest in volume compared to the Breakthrough Listen (BL) search, our search has distinct advantages and samples a fraction of the search volume that is not explored by other programs. In particular, we explore frequency drift rates that are 2-4 times as large as those explored by BL. The maximum drift rate that we sample corresponds to a line-of-sight acceleration between transmitter and receiver of 2 m/s2. We anticipate a line-of-sight acceleration due to the orbital and rotational motions of the world or structure hosting the transmitter, but the exact magnitude of the acceleration cannot be predicted without detailed knowledge of these motions. In addition to a greater range of frequency drift rates, we also detect 10-15 times as many candidate signals as BL in a given data set because of different signal detection algorithms.
In the November 2019 edition of this newsletter, I reported on the U.S. Senate's NASA Authorization Act of 2019, which provides that "the [NASA] Administrator shall support activities to search for and analyze technosignatures" (emphasis added). Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives released its version–the NASA Authorization Act of 2020, which is regrettably less specific. It appears to support research on (though not necessarily searches for) technosignatures, as provided below (emphasis added):
(a) SENSE OF CONGRESS.—It is the sense of Congress that the search for life in the universe is an integral component of the Administration’s space science program and that the search for life in the universe has increasingly encompassed a multi- and interdisciplinary approach. It is the further sense of Congress that research related to the search for life has encompassed nongovernment funded research on and searches for intelligent life. Those efforts include searches for signatures of advanced technologies that could be used to indicate the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth, or what is referred to as "technosignatures".
(b) RESEARCH.—The Administrator may support, as appropriate, peer-reviewed, competitively-selected research on technosignatures.
It remains to be seen what the NASA Act will contain once it is enacted, and what NASA does with it. Let's hope that the Senate's language decisively supporting the search for technosignatures survives and gets implemented. To that effect, I contributed to an advocacy letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which was co-signed by approximately 60 scientists.
Warm regards,
Jean-Luc Margot
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