A Serendipitous MWA Search for Narrowband Signals from ‘Oumuamua
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We examine data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in the frequency range 72–102 MHz for a field of view that serendipitously contained the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua on 2017 November 28. Observations took place with a time resolution of 0.5 s and a frequency resolution of 10 kHz. Based on the interesting but highly unlikely suggestion that ‘Oumuamua is an interstellar spacecraft, due to some unusual orbital and morphological characteristics, we examine our data for signals that might indicate the presence of intelligent life associated with ‘Oumuamua. We searched our radio data for (1) impulsive narrowband signals, (2) persistent narrowband signals, and (3) impulsive broadband signals. We found no such signals with nonterrestrial origins and make estimates of the upper limits on equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) for these three cases of approximately 7 kW, 840 W, and 100 kW, respectively. These transmitter powers are well within the capabilities of human technologies, and are therefore plausible for alien civilizations. While the chances of positive detection in any given search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) experiment are vanishingly small, the characteristics of new generation telescopes such as the MWA (and, in the future, the Square Kilometre Array) make certain classes of SETI experiments easy, or even a trivial by-product of astrophysical observations. This means that the future costs of SETI experiments are very low, allowing large target lists to partially balance the low probability of a positive detection.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it