The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Searching for Technosignatures in Observations of TESS Targets of Interest

TL;DR

This study extends the Breakthrough Listen SETI search to TESS-identified exoplanet host stars, using wideband radio observations to set deep limits on extraterrestrial technosignatures and transmitter power.

Contribution

It is the first to target TESS exoplanet candidates with the Breakthrough Listen program, employing a modified turboSETI pipeline for wideband radio searches from 1-11 GHz.

Findings

Fewer than 12.72% of targets have transmitters above the threshold power.

The observations set some of the deepest limits to date on technosignatures across 1-11 GHz.

No extraterrestrial signals were detected in the surveyed data.

Abstract

Exoplanetary systems are prime targets for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). With the recent uptick in the identification of candidate and confirmed exoplanets through the work of missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we are beginning to understand that Earth-like planets are common. In this work, we extend the Breakthrough Listen (BL) search for extraterrestrial intelligence to include targeted searches of stars identified by TESS as potential exoplanet hosts. We report on 113 30-min cadence observations collected for 28 targets selected from the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) from among those identified as containing signatures of transiting planets. The targets were searched for narrowband signals from 1-11 GHz using the turboSETI pipeline architecture modified for compatibility with the Google Cloud environment. Data were searched for drift rates of +/-4 Hz/s above a minimum signal-to-noise threshold of 10, following the parameters of previous searches conducted by Price et al. (2020) and Enriquez et al. (2017). The observations presented in this work establish some of the deepest limits to date over such a wide band (1-11 GHz) for life beyond Earth. We determine that fewer than 12.72% of the observed targets possess transmitters operating at these frequencies with an Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) greater than our derived threshold of 4.9*10^(14) W.