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An interferometric SETI observation of Kepler-111 b
Wandia, Kelvin; Garrett, Michael A.; Radcliffe, Jack Frederick; Garrington, Simon T.; Fawcett, James; Gajjar, Vishal; MacMahon, David H.E.; Varenius, Eskil; Campbell, Robert M.; Paragi, Zsolt; Siemion, Andrew P.V.
The application of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been limited to date, despite the technique offering many advantages o v er traditional single-dish SETI observations. In order to further develop interferometry for SETI, we used the European VLBI network (EVN) at 21 cm to observe potential secondary phase calibrators in the Kepler field. Unfortunately, no secondary calibrators were detected. Ho we ver, a VLBA primary calibrator in the field, J1926 + 4441, offset only ∼1.88 arcmin from a nearby exoplanet Kepler-111 b, was correlated with high temporal ( 0 . 25 s ) and spectral ( 16384 ×488 Hz channels ) resolution. During the analysis of the high-resolution data, we identified a spectral feature that was present in both the auto and cross-correlation data with a central frequency of 1420.424 ±0.0002 MHz and a width of 0.25 MHz. We demonstrate that the feature in the cross-correlations is an artefact in the data, associated with a significant increase in each telescope’s noise figure due to the presence of H I in the beam. This would typically go unnoticed in data correlated with standard spectral resolution. We flag (excluded from the subsequent analysis) these channels and phase rotate the data to the location of Kepler-111 b aided by the Gaia catalogue and search for signals with SNR > 7 . At the time of our observations, we detect no transmitters with an equivalent isotropically radiated power 4 ×10 15 W.
Description:
DATA AVAILABILITY : Data underlying this article are publicly available in the EVN Data Archive at JIVE at www.jive.eu/select -experiment and can be accessed with project codes RSG12 and RSW02. The e -MERLIN data and reduced EVN data will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.
This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium).