Stellar Gravitational Lens Engineering for Interstellar Communication and Artifact SETI

Several recent works have proposed a “stellar relay” transmission system in which a spacecraft at the focus of a star’s gravitational lens achieves dramatic boosts in the gain of an outgoing or incoming interstellar transmission. We examine some of the engineering requirements of a stellar relay system, evaluate the long-term sustainability of a gravitational relay, and describe the perturbations and drifts that must be actively countered to maintain a relay-star-target alignment. The major perturbations on a relay-Sun-target alignment are the inwards gravity of the Sun and the reflex motion of the Sun imparted by the planets. These ∼m s−1 yr−1 accelerations can be countered with modern propulsion systems over century-long timescales. This examination is also relevant for telescope designs aiming to use the Sun as a focusing element. We additionally examine prospects for an artifact SETI search to observe stellar relays placed around the Sun by an extraterrestrial intelligence and suggest certain nearby stars that are relatively unperturbed by planetary systems as favorable nodes for a stellar relay communications system.

Imprints of Gravitational Millilensing on the Light Curve of Gamma-Ray Bursts

In this work, we search for signatures of gravitational millilensing in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in which the source−lens−observer geometry produces two images that manifest in the GRB light curve as superimposed peaks with identical temporal variability (or echoes), separated by the time delay between the two images. According to the sensitivity of our detection method, we consider millilensing events due to point-mass lenses in the range of 105 − 107 M ⊙ at lens redshift about half that of the GRB, with a time delay on the order of 10 s. Current GRB observatories are capable of resolving and constraining this lensing scenario if the above conditions are met. We investigated the Fermi/GBM GRB archive from the year 2008 to 2020 using the autocorrelation technique and found one millilensed GRB candidate out of 2137 GRBs searched, which we use to estimate the optical depth of millilensed GRBs by performing a Monte Carlo simulation to find the efficiency of our detection method. Considering a point-mass model for the gravitational lens, where the lens is a supermassive black hole, we show that the density parameter of black holes (ΩBH) with mass ≈ 106 M ⊙ is about 0.007 ± 0.004. Our result is one order of magnitude larger compared to previous work in the lower mass range of 102 − 103 M ⊙, which gave a density parameter ΩBH ≈ 5 × 10−4, and recent work in the mass range of 102 − 107 M ⊙, which reported ΩBH ≈ 4.6 × 10−4. The mass fraction of black holes in this mass range to the total mass of the universe would be f = ΩBH/Ω M ≈ 0.027 ± 0.016.

Gravitational Lensing of Supernova Neutrino Bursts

Supernova neutrino bursts have been observed from extragalactic distances. This note addresses the question of how gravitational lensing could distort the information in the burst. We apply the gravitational lens hypothesis to try to understand the time and brightness structure of the SN1987A neutrino observations. Estimates of a possible lensing mass and alignment are made. These estimates suggest a path to verification.