Breakthrough listen search for intelligent life

Past works have made use of phase-folded stellar lightcurves in order to study the properties of exoplanet transits because this provides the highest signal that a transit is present at a given period and ephemeris.

Characterizing transits on an individual, rather than phase-folded, basis is much more challenging due to the often low signal-to-noise ratio of lightcurves, missing data, and low sampling rates. However, by phase folding a lightcurve we implicitly assume that all transits have the same expected properties, and lose all information about the nature and variability of the transits. We miss the natural variability in transit shapes, or even the deliberate or inadvertent modification of transit signals by an extraterrestrial civilization (for example, via laser emission or orbiting megastructures).