Futurology

Much of current SETI efforts are focused on searching for radio signals. That approach has one major flaw - the huge amount of radio waves generated on Earth that have to be filtered as possible false positives. These researchers say their method may completely bypass this problem.

China has the world's largest radio telescope, the 500-meter FAST telescope, and they say these techniques will be used there. There are many global efforts to scan exoplanets for simple microbial extra-terrestrial life, but it's possible techno-signatures from something more advanced could be discovered first.

So based on the abstract, they use a multiple small fields of view, each of which crosses a star at different times, instead of one main one. They can then correlate anything unusual they find with which stars are in the field of view. Nifty.