Search for Galactic Civilizations Using Historical Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel interstellar signaling method that uses historical supernovae as reference points to efficiently search for extraterrestrial intelligence, refining previous schemes with a game-theoretic approach.

Contribution

It introduces an improved signaling scheme that leverages past supernovae observations to optimize ETI search regions, enhancing previous proposals with a geometrical and game-theoretic framework.

Findings

Historical supernovae can guide targeted ETI searches.

The scheme reduces the search area to less than one steradian.

Some supernovae, like SN 393, are no longer useful for this method.

Abstract

We study an interstellar signaling scheme which was originally proposed by Seto (2019) and efficiently links intentional transmitters to ETI searchers through a conspicuous astronomical burst, without prior communication. Based on the geometrical and game theoretic viewpoints, the scheme can be refined so that intentional signals can be sent and received after observing a reference burst, in contrast to the original proposal (before observing a burst). Given this inverted temporal structure, Galactic supernovae recorded in the past 2000 years can be regarded as interesting guideposts for an ETI search. While the best use period of SN 393 has presumably passed $\sim$100 years ago, some of the historical supernovae might allow us to compactify the ETI survey regions down to less than one present of $4\pi$, around two rings in the sky.