Narrowband Radio Technosignature Search toward 3I/ATLAS with FAST

TL;DR

This study conducted a sensitive search for narrowband radio technosignatures from interstellar object 3I/ATLAS using FAST, finding no evidence of extraterrestrial transmitters and establishing upper limits on possible signal power.

Contribution

It presents the first narrowband radio technosignature search toward 3I/ATLAS with FAST, including a Bayesian framework to constrain transmitter properties based on null results.

Findings

No credible technosignatures detected.

Constraints on transmitter power above 2.862×10⁻³ W.

Introduced Bayesian inference for transmitter probability estimation.

Abstract

3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed interstellar object passing through the Solar System. In this work, we conduct narrowband radio technosignature search toward 3I/ATLAS using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) L-band multibeam receiver from October 2025 to January 2026 on 4 separate dates (i.e. Mars closest, perihelion, Earth closest and flew away from Earth, respectively). We carry out frequency-drifting signal searching with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over 10 within 1.05-1.45 GHz via \texttt{bliss} pipeline. These signal hits are grouping into event by beam, frequency and drift rate matching, the events are then filtered by cluster analysis and drift rate cut-off. We also characterized the events by their significance in SNR, structure tensor as well as principal component analysis (PCA). No credible narrowband radio technosignature are detected from 3I/ATLAS after visual inspections. The null results place constraints on the presence of transmitters above $2.862\times 10^{-3}$ W. We further introduce a Bayesian inference framework to constraints on the existence probability and characteristic power of hypothetical transmitters using physically motivated priors to bracket plausible transmitter scenarios.