SETI and Signal Leakage: Where Do Our Transmissions Go?

The old trope about signals from Earth reaching other civilizations receives an interesting twist when you ponder just what those signals might be. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan has researchers led by Ellie Arroway discover an encrypted TV signal showing images from the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Thus returned, the signal announces contact (in a rather uncomfortable way). More comfortable is the old reference to aliens watching “I Love Lucy” episodes in their expanding cone of flight that began in 1951. How such signals could be detected is another matter.

I’m reminded of a good friend whose passion for classical music has caused him to amass a collection of recordings that rival the holdings of a major archive. John likes to compare different versions of various pieces of music. How did Beecham handle Delius’ “A Walk in the Paradise Garden” as opposed to Leonard Slatkin? Collectors find fascination in such things. And one day John called me with a question. He was collecting the great radio broadcasts that Toscanini had made with the NBC Symphony Orchestra beginning in 1937. His question: Are they still out there somewhere?

Image: A screenshot of Arturo Toscanini from the World War II era film ‘Hymn of the Nations,’ December, 1943. Credit: US Office of War Information.

John’s collection involved broadcasts that had been preserved in recordings, of course, but he wanted to know if somewhere many light years away another civilization could be listening to these weekly broadcasts, which lasted (on Earth) until 1954. We mused on such things as the power levels of such signal leakage (not to mention the effect of the ionosphere on AM radio wavelengths!), and the fact that radio transmissions lose power with the square of distance, so that those cherished Toscanini broadcasts are now hopelessly scattered. At least John has the Earthly versions, having finally found the last missing broadcast, making a complete set for his collection.

Toscanini was a genius, and these recordings are priceless (John gave me the complete first year on a set of CDs – they’re received a lot of play at my house). But let’s play around with this a bit more, because a new paper from Reilly Derrick (UCLA) and Howard Isaacson (UC-Berkeley) tweaks my attention. The authors note that when it comes to the leakage of signals into space, a 5 MW UHF television picture has effective radiated power of 5 x 10⁶ W and an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of approximately 8 x 10⁶ W. ERP tells us the strength of an actual signal in a specific direction, while EIRP describes an isotropic ideal antenna.

It’s interesting to see that a much more powerful signal than our TV broadcasts comes from the Deep Space Network as it communicates with our spacecraft. Derrick and Isaacson say that DSN transmissions at 20 kW power have an EIRP of 10¹⁰ W, making such signals (10³ times higher than leakage, thus more likely to be detected. With this in mind, the authors come up with a new way to identify SETI targets; viz., find stars that are within the background of sky positions occupied by our spacecraft at such times as the transmissions to them from the DSN were active.

Ingenious. Remember that identifying interesting SETI targets has led us to study such things as the ‘Earth Transit Zone,’ which would identify stars so aligned as to be able to see transits of Earth across the Sun. In a similar way, we can study stars whose ecliptic planes align with our line of sight to intercept possible communications in those systems. It turns out that most of our outbound radio traffic to spacecraft occurs near the ecliptic, and the assumption would be that other civilizations might do the same.

Image: With the Pluto/Charon flyby, we have performed reconnaissance on every planet and dwarf planet in our solar system, with the help of the Deep Space Network. The DSN comprises three facilities separated by about 120 degrees around the Earth: Goldstone, California; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. Above is the 70-meter Deep Space Station 14 (DSS-14), the largest Deep Space Network antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

So what Derrick and Isaacson are doing is an extension of this earlier work (see SETI: Knowing Where to Look and Seeing Earth as a Transiting World for some of the archival material I’ve written on these studies). The authors want to know where our DSN signals went after they reached our spacecraft, and that means building an ephemeris for our deep space missions that are leaving or have left the Solar System: Voyagers 1 and 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. They then consult the positions of over 300,000 stars within 100 parsecs as drawn from the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars, checking to ensure that the stars they identify will not leave the radius of the search in the time it takes for the cone of transmission to reach them.

The Voyagers were launched in 1977, with both of them now outside the heliosphere. As to the others, Pioneer 10 (launched in 1972) crossed the orbit of Neptune in 1983, while Pioneer 11 (launched in 1973) crossed Neptune’s orbit in 1990. New Horizons, launched in 2006, crossed Neptune’s orbit in 2014. All these craft received or are receiving DSN transmissions, though the Pioneers have long since gone silent. Their ephemerides thus end on the final day of communication, while the other missions are ongoing.

The universe is indeed prolific – the Gaia Catalogue includes 331,312 stars within 100 parsecs, and as the authors note, it is complete for stars brighter than M8 and contains 92 percent of the M9 dwarfs in this range. We learn that Pioneer 11 – I should say the signals sent to Pioneer 11 and thus beyond it – encounters the largest group of stars at 411, while New Horizons has the least, 112. The figures on Voyager 1, 2 and Pioneer 10 are 289, 325, and 241 stars, respectively. Transmissions to Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have already encountered at least one star, while Voyager 1 and New Horizons signals will encounter stars in the near future. From the paper:

Transmissions to Voyager have already encountered an M-dwarf, GJ 1154, and a brown dwarf, Gaia EDR3 6306068659857135232. Transmissions to Pioneer 10 have encountered a white dwarf, GJ 1276. Transmissions to Pioneer 11 have encountered a M-dwarf, GJ 359. We have shown that the radio transmissions using the DSN are stronger than typical leakage and are useful for identifying good technosignature targets. Just as the future trajectories of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft have been calculated and their future interactions with distant stars cataloged by Bailer-Jones & Farnocchia (2019), we now also consider the paths of DSN communications with those spacecraft to the stars beyond them.

The paper provides a table showing stars encountered by transmissions to the spacecraft sorted by the year we could expect a return transmission if a civilization noted them, along with data on the time spent by the star within the transmission beam. DSN transmissions are several orders of magnitude smaller in EIRP than the Arecibo planetary radar (10¹² W), but it’s also true that the positions of the spacecraft, and hence background stars during transmissions, are better documented than background stars that would have encountered the Arecibo signals.

So what we have here is a small catalog of stars whose systems are in the background of DSN transmissions, and the dates when each star will encounter such signals. The goal is to offer a list of higher value targets for scarce SETI time and resources, especially concentrating on those stars nearest the Sun where civilizations may have noticed us. I don’t hold out high hopes for our receiving a signal from any of these stars, but find the process fascinating. Derrick and Isaacson offer a new way of considering our position in the galaxy in relation to the stars that surround us.

The paper is Derrick & Isaacson, “The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Nearby Stars’ Close Encounters with the Brightest Earth Transmissions,” available as a preprint. Thanks to my friend Antonio Tavani for the pointer to this work. The Bailer-Jones & Farnocchia paper mentioned above is likewise interesting. It’s “Future Stellar Flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer Spacecraft,” Research Notes of the AAS Vol. 3, No. 4 (April 2019) 59 (full text).

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