The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A 3.95–8.00 GHz Search for Radio Technosignatures in the Restricted Earth Transit Zone

Abstract

Abstract We report on a search for artificial narrowband signals of 20 stars within the restricted Earth Transit Zone (rETZ) as a part of the ten-year Breakthrough Listen (BL) search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). The rETZ is the region of the sky from which an observer would see Earth transit the Sun with an impact parameter of less than 0.5. This region of the sky is geometrically unique, providing a potential way for an ETI to discover the solar system. The targets were nearby (7–143 pc) and the search covered an electromagnetic frequency range of 3.95–8.00 GHz. We used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope to perform these observations with the standard BL data recorder. We searched these data for artificial narrowband (∼Hz) signals with Doppler drift rates of ±20 Hz s−1. We find no evidence for radio technosignatures from ETI in our observations. The observing campaign would have allowed for detections of emissions that were 10−3 to 0.88 times as powerful as the signaling capability of the Arecibo radar transmitter. We conclude that at least 0.6% of the systems in the rETZ within 150 pc do not possess the type of transmitters searched in this survey. To our knowledge, this is the first targeted search for ETI of the rETZ. All data used in this paper are publicly available via the BL Public Data Archive (http://seti.berkeley.edu/bldr2).