A Solution to Continuous RFI in Narrowband Radio SETI with FAST: The MultiBeam Point-source Scanning Strategy

Abstract

Abstract Narrowband radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the 21st century suffers severely from radio frequency interference (RFI), resulting in a high number of false positives, and it could be the major reason why we have not yet received any messages from space. We thereby propose a novel observation strategy, called MultiBeam Point-source Scanning (MBPS), to revolutionize the way RFI is identified in narrowband radio SETI and provide a prominent solution to the current situation. The MBPS strategy is a simple yet powerful method that sequentially scans over the target star with different beams of a telescope, creating real-time references in the time domain for cross-verification and thus potentially identifying all continuous RFI with a level of certainty never achieved in any previous attempts. By applying the MBPS strategy during the observation of TRAPPIST-1 with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, we successfully identified all 6972 received signals as RFI using the solid criteria introduced by the MBPS strategy. Therefore, we present the MBPS strategy as a promising tool that should bring us much closer to the first discovery of a genuine galactic greeting.