A Search for Radio Technosignatures from Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS with the Allen Telescope Array

Journal article

In 2025 July, the third-ever interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was discovered on its ingress into the solar system. Similar to the NASA Voyager missions sent in 1977, science probes by extraterrestrial life (“artifact technosignatures”) could be sent to explore other stellar systems like our own. In this campaign, we used the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array to observe 3I/ATLAS from 1–9 GHz. We detected nearly 74 million narrowband hits in 7.25 hr of data using the newly developed search pipeline bliss. We then blanked hits by frequency and drift rate to mitigate radio frequency interference in our dataset, narrowing the dataset down to ∼2 million hits. These hits were further filtered by the localization code NBeamAnalysis, and the remaining 211 hits were visually inspected in the time-frequency domain. We did not find any signals worthy of additional follow-up. Accounting for the Doppler drift correction and given the nondetection, we are able to set an effective isotropic radiated power upper limit of 10–110 W on radio technosignatures from 3I/ATLAS across the frequency and drift rate ranges covered by our survey.

Authors: Sheikh, SZ; Garcia Lopez, V; Gerrard, I; Davenport, JRA; Farah, W

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Journal: The Astronomical Journal
• Volume: 172
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1
• Article number: 1
• Publication date: 2026-06-03
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-27
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ae6651
• EISSN: 1538-3881
• ISSN: 0004-6256
• Language: English
• Keywords: Radio spectroscopy; Technosignatures; Search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Radio interferometry; Interstellar objects