A solution to continuous RFI in narrowband radio SETI with FAST: The MultiBeam Point-source Scanning strategy

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MultiBeam Point-source Scanning (MBPS) strategy for narrowband radio SETI, which effectively identifies RFI in real-time, demonstrated by its successful application to TRAPPIST-1 data from FAST, reducing false positives.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel MBPS observation strategy that improves RFI identification in narrowband radio SETI by real-time cross-verification using multiple beams.

Findings

Successfully identified all 16,645 signals as RFI during TRAPPIST-1 observation

MBPS strategy achieves real-time RFI discrimination with high certainty

Potential to significantly reduce false positives in SETI searches

Abstract

Narrowband radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the 21st century suffers severely from radio frequency interference (RFI), resulting in a high number of false positives, and it could be the major reason why we have not yet received any messages from space. We thereby propose a novel observation strategy, called MultiBeam Point-source Scanning (MBPS), to revolutionize the way RFI is identified in narrowband radio SETI and provide a prominent solution to the current situation. The MBPS strategy is a simple yet powerful method that sequentially scans over the target star with different beams of a telescope, hence creating real-time references in the time domain for cross-verification, thus potentially identifying all long-persistent RFI with a level of certainty never achieved in any previous attempts. By applying the MBPS strategy during the observation of TRAPPIST-1 with the FAST telescope, we successfully identified all 16,645 received signals as RFI using the solid criteria introduced by the MBPS strategy. Therefore we present the MBPS strategy as a promising tool that should bring us much closer to the first discovery of a genuine galactic greeting.