Results Of Ten Tears Of UCLA SETI Searches With The Green Bank Telescope

We have been conducting a search for narrowband radio signals with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope (Margot et al., 2023). So far, we have captured radio emissions from 70,000+ stars and planetary systems in the ~9 arcminute beam of the telescope.

Our data-processing pipeline has a demonstrated 94%-99% efficiency for the detection of narrowband signals across the full range of frequency drift rates (+/-9 Hz/s). All 100 million candidate signals detected to date were either automatically (99.5%) or visually (0.5%) confirmed to be anthropogenic in nature.

These results allow us to place stringent limits on transmitter prevalence: at the 95% confidence level, fewer than 6.3e-5 of stars within 20,000 ly host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP > 5e16 W). Our most interesting signals have been uploaded to a citizen science platform at Zooniverse , where 40,000+ volunteers to date have contributed insights and classifications.

We are using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate our search, automatically excise radio frequency interference, and improve signal detection. UCLA SETI research has involved ~200 undergraduate and ~20 graduate students so far.

Jean-Luc Margot

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Proceedings of IAU Symposium 404 Advancing the Search for Technosignatures}
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.05408 [astro-ph.IM](or arXiv:2605.05408v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05408
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Submission history
From: Jean-Luc Margot
[v1] Wed, 6 May 2026 19:58:33 UTC (106 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05408
Astrobiology, SETI,