Guest Editorial

Astronomy is moving at a clip that sees more data accumulated than can possibly be examined at the time they're collected. We're creating vast storehouses of information that can be approached from various angles of study. Now ponder how we might use these data for purposes beyond what they were collected for. In a new paper submitted to the Astronomical Journal, Ermanno Borra (Université Laval, Québec) looks at how standard astronomical spectra -- including those already taken -- can be used as part of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Here's the idea: Suppose somewhere out there a civilization decides to reveal its existence to the rest of the galaxy. These extraterrestrials reason from their own experience of science that an advanced civilization will study the sky and take spectra of astronomical objects. These spectra become the medium upon which the senders impose their signal. At our end, spectroscopic surveys of vast numbers of stars allow us to accumulate data that may contain evidence of an unusual signal, a spectrum deliberately crafted to be so striking that it calls attention to itself.

How to create the signal? Through modulating the spectrum by sending short bursts of laser light, an idea Borra addressed in a 2010 paper, as discussed again in this one:

Borra (2010) shows that periodic time variations of the intensity signal originating from a pulsating source modulate its frequency spectrum with periodic structures. Periodic time variations of the intensity signal originating from a pulsating source with periods between 10^-10 and 10^-15 seconds would modulate its spectrum with periodic structures detectable in standard astronomical spectra. Periods shorter than 10^-10 seconds could be detected in high-resolution spectra. Note that the modulation is rigorously periodic in the frequency units spectrum but not in the wavelength units spectrum.

You can see the beauty of this proposition. We already have mountains of spectroscopic data acquired for other studies, data that can be analyzed visually or through Fourier transform software. Borra wants to make astronomers aware of this potential use for such data as a complement to existing optical SETI work carried out at sites like the Wyeth Telescope (Harvard/Smithsonian Oak Ridge Observatory) and the SERENDIP instrument at UC-Berkeley. The latter are cutting-edge projects, but with some limitations, the biggest being that they can observe only one object at a time. They also require either dedicated instruments or telescope time on standard telescopes, a limitation that a database hunt of earlier work surmounts.

Borra finds that the energy needed to generate the needed signals is feasible even for a civilization like ours -- he analyzes it in terms of current equipment by referencing diode-pumped laser technology similar to the Helios laser designed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for inertial confinement fusion studies. The result: An isolated signal transmitted at 1000 light years (a sphere within which there are roughly a million stars) would be detectable with today's instruments. A spectroscopic survey like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey could find it.

By 'isolated' signal, Borra means a signal sent from a place distant enough from the home star so that the signal would not be directly superimposed on the spectrum of the star itself. The other case is a signal sent from the home planet, one that would therefore mix with the stellar spectrum. Now the signal becomes harder to detect because it is considerably weaker than the total energy of the stellar spectrum, requiring the extraterrestrial senders to resort to more powerful sources. Here Borra references the 2004 paper from which he drew the Helios comparisons:

...we can assume that, considering the Moore's law of laser technology, a more advanced civilization should have no trouble increasing the laser power by 2 to 3 orders magnitude making the signal readily detectable. For a solar-type star at 1000 ly the signal would then be comparable to the stellar background and thus easily detectable... The Moore law suggestion is intuitively justified by simply imagining how Howard et al. (2004) and the present article would have been received before the invention of the laser 60 years ago, when the signal would have had to be generated with light bulbs!

A Kardashev Type I civilization should be able to manage the power output to make its superimposed signal observable at nearby stars, but a Type II would be capable of harnessing all the energies available from its home star, making the production of such signals feasible for vast numbers of potential recipients. Because, as Jill Tarter has often commented, civilizations trying to contact us are likely to be more advanced technologically than we are, the possibility of finding such Type II civilization signals in astronomical spectra becomes an intriguing issue.

What's appealing about Borra's approach is its sheer simplicity. The database-mining idea for SETI has a history in the literature going back to papers in 1977 (Zbigniew Paprotny) and 1980 (Daniel Whitmire and David Wright), who suggested searching for anomalous spectral lines originating from radioactive fissile waste material. Geoff Marcy and Amy Reines have carried out a search of 577 nearby stars looking for emission lines too narrow to be natural. Signal-finding algorithms incorporated into existing software can be used with present and future spectroscopic data to continue this hunt, all achieved, as Borra says, with a few lines of code.

Is a SETI signal to be found in our databases? The paper is Borra, "Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence signals in astronomical spectra, including existing data," accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal.