The GAVRT SETI Project Results

This poster reports the results from a student-led Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

targeting the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy as a part of the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio

Telescope (GAVRT) collaboration between the Lewis Center for Educational Research (LCER)

and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). GAVRT’s frequency of observation (8.4 GHz) is not

covered by most other SETI programs. Students associated with LCER write analytic reports of

spectral data targeting specific regions of the Milky Way identifying interference, noise, and

candidate signals potentially originating from intelligent sources. GAVRT-SETI’s search is

guided by the assumption that a narrow-band radio signal from a fixed location in the sky,

occurring across multiple observation periods, is unlikely to be caused by a natural source. Thus,

we searched the report data for similar signals occurring either on adjacent scan lines within the

telescope resolution (doublets, triplets) or during different observation periods within the same

region of sky (potential candidates) using general data science pre-processing and analysis

approaches. Our analysis revealed patterns in the distribution of interference and candidate signal

frequencies. The non-randomness of these patterns suggests that these radio sources are

non-trivial and may be able to be identified upon further examination.