Giant Radio Bursts from the Crab Nebula Pulsar: A First Step in Detecting Alien Technosignatures with the Allen Telescope Array
Abstract
Since the first exoplanet detections, thousands of worlds with a broad range of characteristics have been detected in systems all over the universe. Of these, many have demonstrated some of the requirements for hosting life as we know it. However, these remotely observable markers of potential life are generally not unambiguous. More rigorous detection methods usually require in-situ methods of analysis, a standard that is difficult to meet given the presently long spacetravel times. Thus we are, for now at least, limited to passive observations. This raises the question of how alien life could be unambiguously detected, and the answer lies in technosignatures. Electromagnetic broadcasts are the only markers of life which can be passively observed, unambiguously interpreted, and transmitted across interstellar space in relatively short time spans. With mankind's recent advances into the reaches of space for answers to our most fundamental questions, radio astronomy has come to attention as an efficient and reliable way to passively examine incoming signals from every corner of the universe. One capable and particularly underutilized tool is the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), located at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) in northern California, an interferometric radio telescope that comprises 42 6.5-m antennas equipped with novel broadband log periodic dipole receivers covering 1-12 GH. With ongoing upgrades and improvements, it is destined to be a widely useful instrument. One project for which it is well suited is the detection of enigmatic Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which are especially interesting because of their unknown origins. As FRB observations become more numerous, a method for detection and localization becomes increasingly necessary. The purpose of this work is to establish an FRB detection and localization capability for the ATA. We use the Crab Pulsar, known for its regular giant radio pulses, as a proxy (with known parameters) for FRBs to establish our software detection capabilities and create a basic visualization pipeline, with hopes to obtain observations of the Crab Pulsar with the ATA, establish a localization algorithm, and apply this process to new FRB detections in future work.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23522708D