Optical Flashes from Beam-Driven Light Sails with the Roman, Rubin and Euclid Observatories

Abstract

The primary challenge of rocket propulsion is the burden of accelerating the spacecraft's own fuel. Light sails leave the propellant at home, with the achievable speed set by the sail area, the thermal tolerance of its material, and the power of the driving array. In GL15 we showed that leakage from a microwave array driving such a sail between habitable worlds produces Jansky-level radio transients lasting tens of seconds at $100$~pc. We take that leak to optical and near-infrared, where Fresnel matching would shrink the aperture to $\sim\!20$--$100$~m at $1\,μ{\rm m}$, but the intensity on that aperture is $2\times10^{8}\,{\rm W\,m^{-2}}$, five orders above published directed-energy loadings. Spreading $1.5$~TW at $\sim20\,{\rm kW\,m^{-2}}$ is a $\sim10$~km phased array, pushing the emitters; Lubin's $10^{3}\,{\rm W\,m^{-2}}$ loading is a $40$~km array, comfortable but more expensive. A tenth-wave delay on $40$~m tiles sized so one tile still covers the sail leaks $0.054$ of the power ($80$~GW) into a halo. The typical Galactic detection is a single $\sim30$~s peak at $m_{\rm AB}\simeq19.4$ in F146 at $8$~kpc; a pair $87$~s apart, about one in five, is the confirmation test. \emph{Roman}'s Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey reaches $109$~kpc at $8σ$ on a faint host, so a pointed flash of that halo is visible from anywhere in the Galaxy if the beam points at us. For $10$--$40$~km optical beamers held to $\simλ/10$ at $v_{\rm max}\gtrsim250\,{\rm km\,s^{-1}}$, $N_{\rm det}=1$ wants $Γ_{6{\rm h}}\simeq16$ and a null search limits $Γ_{6{\rm h}}\lesssim49$, a factor-of-three window in launch rate. The real threshold is set by PSF-coincident stellar and instrumental transients. If intensity-limited optical beamers are commonly employed in our galaxy, this activity could be revealed by Roman, Rubin and Euclid at no additional observing cost.