COSMIC's Large-Scale Search for Technosignatures during the VLA sky Survey: Survey Description and First Results

TL;DR

This paper details the development and implementation of a large-scale search for technosignatures using the VLA, including a new postprocessing pipeline, with initial results from over 950,000 observations and no detections of extraterrestrial signals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel postprocessing pipeline for technosignature searches and demonstrates its application during the VLA Sky Survey, covering extensive sky observations.

Findings

No unidentifiable signals detected in the surveyed data.

Set power limits for potential signals between 10^11 and 10^16 W.

Surveyed over 950,000 pointings during the VLA Sky Survey.

Abstract

Developing algorithms to search through data efficiently is a challenging part of searching for signs of technology beyond our solar system. We have built a digital signal processing system and computer cluster on the backend of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico in order to search for signals throughout the Galaxy consistent with our understanding of artificial radio emissions. In our first paper, we described the system design and software pipelines. In this paper, we describe a postprocessing pipeline to identify persistent sources of interference, filter out false positives, and search for signals not immediately identifiable as anthropogenic radio frequency interference during the VLA Sky Survey. As of 01 September 2024, the Commensal Open-source Multi-mode Interferometric Cluster had observed more than 950,000 unique pointings. This paper presents the strategy we employ when commensally observing during the VLA Sky Survey and a postprocessing strategy for the data collected during the survey. To test this postprocessing pipeline, we searched toward 511 stars from the $Gaia$ catalog with coherent beams. This represents about 30 minutes of observation during VLASS, where we typically observe about 2000 sources per hour in the coherent beamforming mode. We did not detect any unidentifiable signals, setting isotropic power limits ranging from 10$^{11}$ to 10$^{16}$W.