SETI & Anomalous Signals

[Anonymous]

We always seem to assume that maths is universal - that fundamental numbers such as pi and e are always the same and understood everywhere. What if they are not?

It might be possible that some aliens only think in probabilities, not integers... perhaps they count "one, two, a bit more, even more, enough..." if you look at animals on this planet, some have a good sense of number up to a point, some don't.
It might be difficult to create a technological society without accurate counting, but we have'nt tried it, so it may be possible.
The value for Pi is fairly constant in this universe however, except where space is highly warped.

Maybe the aliens have been sending us signals that we think are natural, whilst we are sending them signals that they think are natural?

Their messages might be coded into pulsar emissions or something I suppose- we could be looking for the wrong type of carrier wave.
We aren't sending signals intentionally. AFAIK, but tv signals might be detectable a long way out ... nothing natural about Pop Idols though.
steve b

 

[ruffready]

seti

You'ed think by now ,we'ed have heard something. It seems fishey to me.

 

[rynner2]

When TV arrived, people began refering to the familiar wireless programmes as 'steam radio', implying that it was an old-fashioned technology. (But it hasn't gone away yet! )

But I suspect that aliens may well have advanced to other means of communications. Already we are using lasers for telecom, and the radio age is barely a century old. It could be that radio is just a passing phase in the development of technological civilizations.

 

[ogopogo3]

70s SETI signal still baffling researchers

What you say? We get signal:

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_wow_021205.html

Interstellar Signal from the 70s Continues to Puzzle Researchers

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
05 December 2002

Of the many "maybe’s" that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. The famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University’s "Big Ear" radio telescope.

The Wow signal’s unusual nomenclature connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for today’s Project Phoenix.)

But is the Wow signal’s notoriety merely the triumph of marketing over substance? Could this momentary cosmic burp have really been ET, or was it just random terrestrial interference dressed up with a sexy moniker? For a decade, Robert Gray, a long-time, independent SETI researcher from Chicago, has been trying to find out.

Gray, like many others, was attracted by an intriguing feature of the Wow signal: the manner in which it rose and fell over the course of 72 seconds. Why is this interesting? Just this: the Ohio State survey kept the telescope fixed, letting the Earth’s daily spin rotate the heavens through its narrow beam. The "beam," of course, was the elongated patch of sky to which the telescope was sensitive – the direction from which it could pick up cosmic signals. The sensitivity was greatest at the center of the beam, falling off to either side. So as a celestial radio source passed by, it first rose in apparent intensity as Earth’s rotation brought it into the beam, reached a peak in the beam center, and then faded away. Given the size of the Ohio State beam, this rise and fall should take 72 seconds. And for the Wow signal, it did.

Now contrast this with what you’d expect if the telescope had merely been briefly flooded by an interfering terrestrial signal. The intensity would suddenly switch full on, and then, sometime later, switch off. Even if the interference was due to a low-Earth orbit satellite, a source that might cause a rise and fall in intensity, you wouldn’t expect it to fortuitously last for 72 seconds.

For these reasons, the Wow signal gets high marks for being a credible candidate for SETI.

On the other hand, there are some aspects of this seductive signal that nudge it toward a lower grade. The Ohio State telescope actually used two beams, situated side-by-side on the sky. Any cosmic source would therefore be seen first in one (for 72 seconds) and then – roughly 3 minutes later – in the other (also 72 seconds.) The Wow signal failed this simple test. It came on gangbusters in one beam, but was a no-show in the other: suspicious and disheartening.

But as Gray and others have realized, this odd, one-beam behavior could be caused by an alien transmission that simply went off the air during the 3 minutes between beams. Maybe ET went on vacation, or took an extended lunch break. If the putative aliens permanently shut down their transmitter, then there’s no chance of ever hearing the Wow signal again. Like a single sighting of the Loch Ness monster, we would never be able to prove what it was. But if the signal is periodic – if, for example, the aliens are using a rotating radio beacon that sweeps the star-studded strata of the Milky Way once every five minutes or every five hours – then we could hope to find it by just looking again.

Robert Gray has looked again. And again. In the last decade, Gray and his colleagues have used the Harvard META SETI system and then the Very Large Array (VLA) to search for a reappearance of the Wow signal. The experiment at the VLA, in particular, was an impressive effort, as it was far more sensitive than the original Ohio State equipment and covered more of the band. Neither attempt succeeded in retrieving the signal, however.

Gray realized that he might be the victim of insufficient patience. The longest of his reobservations had been 22 minutes. What if the aliens’ beacon flashed less often than once every 22 minutes? What if their transmitter was fixed to the home planet, rotating (and flashing) once every 20 or 30 hours?

In the October 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia’s University of Tasmania, report on new observations (partially supported by the SETI Institute) designed to test this idea. Their new try was made at the 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania. This southern hemisphere instrument could continuously follow for most of a day the patch of sky (in the constellation of Sagittarius) where the "Big Ear" was pointing when it found the ‘Wow’ signal. They made six 14-hour observations, and even though their telescope was rather smaller than the venerable Ohio State antenna, they still had sufficient sensitivity to find signals only 5% as strong as Wow’s 1977 intensity. They also covered five times as much of the radio dial as the original "Big Ear" telescope.

Bottom line? No dice. To quote from their article, "no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected…" Of course, if the signal’s repetition cycle were much longer than 14 hours, then even this careful experiment could have easily missed it. But as Gray and Ellingsen point out, if the signal were really this infrequent, then the chance to have found it in the first place was very slim.

So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials? It might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim. Scientific experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical. This isn’t just a sour attitude; it’s the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself. So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the Wow signal will remain a What signal.

 

[rynner2]

Bump! New SETI thread merged on to main one.

 

[Anonymous]

Radio may be a passing technological phase but so were wax tablets. We can still still interpret them (Hadrain's Wall finds) and consider them important.

Maybe the folks out there will also consider our voices important as well.

 

[rynner2]

SETI goes optical.

Article Last Updated: Friday, December 13, 2002 - 8:02:20 AM MST

Space Watch: ETs may be beaming lasers at us
Optical search starts after UC Berkeley astronomer suggests aliens shine light
By William Brand, STAFF WRITER
BERKELEY -- For more than 40 years, researchers on Earth have scanned data from radio telescopes around the world looking for signals from another civilization somewhere in myriad stars -- without results.

Now, thanks to a suggestion from a University of California, Berkeley, Nobel laureate, they're trying something different: Astronomers are peering into space with their own eyes.

They are looking through data from optical telescopes seeking bright bursts of laser light that would indicate a sentient being is out there.

Astronomers have discovered more than 100 planets circling other suns, and belief is growing that we are not alone.

Indeed, scientists now realize life is hardy. Researchers recently found primitive bacteria nearly two miles down in a South African gold mine, surviving on hydrogen and sulfur instead of oxygen.

Nobel Laureate Charles Townes inventor of laser shows off laser beam in a water container at Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley. Ray Chavez - STAFF PHOTO

The nonprofit SETI Institute, based in Mountain View, conducts a massive radio astronomy search using data received by the huge radio telescope array at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

The optical search began about two years ago, and more astronomers are signing on.

Besides a UC Berkeley effort at the Leuschner observatory near Orinda, and by a Harvard astronomer, SETI and UC Santa Cruz are conducting a search from the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, near San Jose. SETI also has commissioned UC Berkeley graduate student Amy Raines to examine data obtained byBerkeley planet hunter Geoff Marcy.

The optical idea came from UC Berkeley professor Charles Townes, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1964 for the basic inventions that led to the laser, which he patented with Arthur Schawlow, a 1981 Nobel laureate.

Townes said Thursday he's delighted about the optical search.

It has always made sense to him to look for points of intense laser light from space, he said. A civilization as advanced as our own or more sophisticated might indeed use a tight, compact laser beam as a bright signal.

(And more.)

 

[Anonymous]

Lasers are a very good option, but just to point out some difficulties
A laser with a spread of 0.000003 degrees (at the very limits of today's technology)
would produce a spot 48,315.2 km wide in a system at one light-year distant
so would need to be very powerful for information to be detectable.
Apparently the spot (footprint) gets smaller as the wavelength gets shorter, so a UV Laser would be better, or even better gamma/x-ray laser
there being no technology yet to send messages by these things
but given a few hundred/thousand years of development, who knows
however, not the sort of thing you could see with an optical telescope

 

[rynner2]

Assuming we do contact another civilization, what do we talk to them about? This article suggests that the subject of altruism and evolution might elicit novel information.

 

[rynner2]

Part One of a two part discussion of what would be considered 'artificial' in a received signal.

It’s worth asking what about a pulsar’s precise radio heartbeat would tell you that they’re not artificial. To begin with, the emissions occur over a wide bandwidth; a broadcast splatter rather similar to the static caused by lightning, and clearly a very inefficient way to transmit information. In addition, endless, regular pulses don’t convey any information. Just as an interminable flute tone would not be music (except, perhaps, to Andy Warhol), so too is an unceasing clock tick devoid of any message.

 

[rynner2]

...and here's Part Two

 

[rynner2]

For some reason, the Part 2 link above didn't work - I tried redoing it, but with the same result. But the link on FT's Breaking News still works, so here's the text:

SETI researchers are a bold lot. They’ve chosen to accept a mission that might dissuade Mr. Phelps. Year after year, they spin their telescopes to the sky, sifting through a broiling rumpus of cosmic static in hopes of finding a signal made by other beings.


But how will they know?


In our previous discussion we talked about the criterion of artificiality: some property of a transmission that would tag it as deliberately constructed – the equivalent of finding stacked cannonballs in a field of stone heaps. It sounds easy, but pulsars, discovered in the late 1960s, showed how quickly we could be duped by a completely natural phenomenon. Since then, SETI researchers have expended considerable neural energy in considering what type of radio emissions would unequivocally qualify as artificial.


An obvious suggestion – and one that well-meaning folks the world over love to send me in e-mails – is to search for a signal that is branded with a mathematical label. For example, maybe the aliens will tag their transmission with the value of pi. That would clearly bespeak a middle school education, and would prove that the signal comes from thinking beings, rather than witless neutron stars or some other cosmic oddity. More numerate correspondents try to improve on pi. Perhaps the extraterrestrials will preface their message with a string of prime numbers, or maybe the first fifty terms of the ever-popular Fibonacci series.


Well, there’s no doubt that such tags would convey intelligence. But what if the prime numbers are only broadcast at the start of a 100-hour interstellar screed, and we tune in somewhere in the middle? We’d miss the label.


In fact, we don’t have to worry about this. Our TV signals, for instance, don’t have repetitive headers with the value of pi attached, and yet we rightly suspect that they are recognizable as the product of a technically advanced society (we’re not talking program content here.) What is it about a TV signal that marks it as artificial? Surely, the picture and sound components make up a dynamic, and clearly non-random distribution of energy across the band. But these components are subtle, and would be rather difficult to detect at great distance.


However, one-third of the TV signal power is squeezed into a tiny part of the dial – a narrow-band carrier that’s only 1 Hz wide or so (the picture and sound are five million times wider.) You don’t see this carrier on the screen, and you don’t hear it from the speakers, thank goodness: your TV tuner uses it to decode the information, and then throws it away. But the point is that such narrow-band signals compress a lot of radio energy into a small bit of spectrum – making them the easiest type of signal to pick out in a sea of static.


SETI Institute signal detection expert Kent Cullers, whose clear thinking routinely enlightens both novice and savant, describes the merits of narrow-band radio signals by comparing them to their audio counterparts.


"Imagine the roar of the ocean or the rustling of leaves in a high wind," he says. "For these natural events, the sound is produced simultaneously from many unsynchronized sources. If we plot the frequencies present in such natural events and compare them to artificial sounds, such as a tuning fork or an auto horn, a startling difference appears. Natural signals have a rather broad frequency spectrum, but the artificial ones usually don’t."


It’s the same with radio emissions. "Sure, if we want to, we can intentionally produce broad messy signals," Cullers notes. "Cell phones that use spread spectrum technology do this, and the military sometimes uses broad signals to intentionally hide them. But it seems that Nature cannot make a pure-tone radio signal."


So the point is simple and sharp. If we detect a signal from the Stygian depths of space that is the equivalent of a tuning fork’s sinusoidal whistle, then we can feel confident that we have found SETI’s vaunted needle in a haystack: a message from another world.


There’s just one trouble with this. A perfect, narrow-band signal can have no message. A tuning fork’s steady note is not music. And it seems only reasonable to assume that if another civilization has troubled to build a transmitter, they won’t waste the megawatts by merely sending an empty signal into space.


In the third and final lap of this journalistic marathon, we’ll discuss how we can reconcile recognizable signals with the obvious need to make interesting ones; and whether it’s reasonable to hope that SETI can find not just cosmic whistles, but a whole celestial symphony.

(Part 3 next week)

 

[Anonymous]

Even if we find a message it is very likely to be encrypted-
an alien civilisation would communicate many things over long distances, some of them quite complicated
for instance
recipes for the manufacture of hi-tech devices,
the genomes of plants, animals and intelligent individuals,
stream of consciousness updates from one advanced intelligent individual to another
(also known as e-mail)
None of these things would be transmitted on an insecure link- so they will no doubt be encrypted, probably beyond any concievable effort at decryption.
So you might realise that there is a message, but never be able to read it.

 

[punychicken]

SETI@home identifies candidate radio signals

no sh!t.... anyway!! spaceref.com ran this story today:

After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.

Three members of the SETI@home team will head to Puerto Rico this month to point the Arecibo radio telescope at up to 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.

SETI@home is a computer program disguised as a screen saver that pops up when a computer is idle and analyzes radio telescope data in search of strong or unusual signals from space. The candidates for re-observation are particularly strong signals or ones that have been observed in the same spot more than once, some of them five or six times.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."

SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.

Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

"If there is any possibility at all of finding an extraterrestrial signal, it's probably much less than one percent," he said.

UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, SETI@home chief scientist, isn't getting his hopes up, either. He has conducted a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for 24 years - 11 years using Arecibo's 1,000-foot diameter radio dish - and has returned several times to look again at promising locations and frequency ranges to determine if a strong radio signal is more than random noise, a glitch or a passing satellite. He has been disappointed each time.

On the other hand, SETI@home has mobilized so much more computing power than has ever before been thrown at signal analysis, that the team has been able to perform much more detailed and complicated computations on the radio data than now possible with Werthimer's ongoing SETI project, called SERENDIP IV (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations).

"I give it a one in 10,000 chance that one of our candidate signals turns out to be from ET," said Werthimer, who will head for Puerto Rico on March 16.

"Whether or not SETI@home succeeds in finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence at this early date, this project has already made history," said Bruce Murray, chairman of The Planetary Society's board of directors. "SETI@home has performed the most sensitive and detailed SETI sky survey to date, has demonstrated the power of the Internet for doing scientific distributed computing, and has allowed the general public to participate directly in an exciting research project."

To acknowledge the 4,287,000-plus users who have analyzed radio data, the SETI@home team will post on its Web site the names of those participants who flagged the candidate signals as a result of data analysis on their home computers. Each candidate signal was analyzed by several people, because SETI@home sends the same data to more than one person to double-check results.

The list of candidates is far longer than 150, but Werthimer suspects that 150 is the maximum he and two colleagues will be able to observe during the 24 hours total available to them at Arecibo Observatory on Mar. 18-20. Criteria for inclusion in the list include not only a strong radio signal and a signal observed more than once in the same spot and frequency range, but also the signal's proximity to a known star and whether that star is known to have planets.

"These factors let us estimate the probability that a candidate is noise," Anderson said. "We're interested in the candidates that are least likely to be noise."

Limited analysis of the signals will be done while the team collects the data, so that observations can be halted and repeated if a very strong signal reappears. Werthimer will be assisted by graduate student Paul Demorest and project scientist Eric Korpela.

A more detailed analysis will be conducted later, Anderson said, ideally with a new version of the SETI@home screensaver based on a new distributed computing platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

SETI@home offered its screensaver to the world in May 1999 as the first example of wide-scale distributed computing - linking idle computers through the Internet to tackle large computational problems. The key to its success was a fruitful collaboration between Anderson, a computer scientist who was one of the principal developers of distributed computing, and Werthimer, a physicist with two decades of experience collecting radio data and parsing it in search of unusual signals from space.

Together, they have drawn in not only sci-fi fans and computer geeks, but many others interested in offering use of their computer to benefit worthwhile projects. SETI@home has spawned numerous other distributed computing projects, including Folding@home to calculate the three-dimensional structure of proteins and climateprediction.net to improve scientific forecasts of 21st century climate.

However, scientists interested in launching similar projects have been daunted by the time and money needed to create the software. To address this problem, Anderson developed BOINC, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to being a general purpose platform, it allows users to partition their computer time among several distributed computing projects.

"BOINC makes it easy for scientists to set up new SETI@home-type projects, and to update their applications on the fly," he said. "Each change to SETI@home required all our users to download and install a new program version, but BOINC manages this process without user intervention."

BOINC also has the capacity to store data in participants' unused disk space, much the way Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa take advantage of PC hard drives to store MP3 music files.

"The amount of unused disk space out there is staggering," Anderson said. "BOINC will let us experiment with new ways of handling data, like sending it through high-speed Internet connections straight from telescopes to PCs and archiving it redundantly on PC disks. This will greatly expand the scope of our SETI research."

The test case for BOINC is Astropulse, which is designed specifically to re-examine SETI@home data in search of short radio pulses, something neither SETI@home nor any other SETI project currently can do very well. According to Werthimer, Astropulse can detect pulsars, which blink on and off at periods up to nearly a millisecond; evaporating black holes, which should emit a brief pulse of radio waves as they blink out of existence; as well as messages from extraterrestrials.

"Astropulse will be the first big test of BOINC," which also provides enhanced, more realistic 3-D graphics, Anderson said. "If we get maybe 1,000 people participating in the first BOINC trial, we could analyze the re-observation data in just a few days."

"This is a whole new way to look for ET," Werthimer said.

He and Anderson emphasize that, while the re-observations are the culmination of nearly four years of data crunching, SETI@home is not coming to an end. Werthimer hopes to set up a southern hemisphere SETI program at Parkes Observatory in Australia, the data to be fed into SETI@home. And data still comes in from the SERENDIP IV instruments on the Arecibo dish, which will soon use upgraded receivers to record data from more than one area of the sky at once.

"This is a milestone, but SETI@home will go on," Anderson said.

 

[Pete Younger]

To acknowledge the 4,287,000-plus users who have analyzed radio data, the SETI@home team will post on its Web site the names of those participants who flagged the candidate signals as a result of data analysis on their home computers. Each candidate signal was analyzed by several people, because SETI@home sends the same data to more than one person to double-check results

How fantastic it would be to discover that it was your computer that analysed the data that confirmed the existence inteligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.

 

[rynner2]

Bump! New thread merged with old.

(Too many signals flyin' about here...)

 

[ruffready]

are you saying

that something "has" been found thats repeating? and they are going to confirm the data etc..and let us know?

 

[Anonymous]

Re: are you saying

that something "has" been found thats repeating? and they are going to confirm the data etc..and let us know?

I think they're saying they've successfully crunched millions of computer hours worth of data and come up with 150+ possible source signals and that they've got the use of a big radio telescope to check out 150 of the most likely sources to see if there's more to them.

The original sample signals may be of quite short duration, just enough to suggest something produced artificially, rather than a natural burst of electromagentic noise from a stellar flare, or some such.

Chances are still 10,000 to 1 slim, but that's good 'cause it's a big Universe out there.

 

[Anonymous]

HEY.... I might be famous soon, I did some number crunching for SETI !

 

[ruffready]

hey thanks andro!!

you explained that subperbly!! I'm crossing my figures, that something turns up..oh and good luck Gimauche

 

[Anonymous]

I hope I am wrong, but I don't think that SETI is going to be sucessful using the radio telescopes we have today.
The emissions from a civilisation as advanced as our own wouldn't be detectable more than a few hundred light years away, so they assume that a more advanced (or at any rate a more energy intensive) civilisation would produce transmissions with more power.

This may be true, but these transmissions are likely to be narrow beam rather than broadcast and quite possibly at a higher wavelength in order to avoid beam scattering (possibly visible light or beyond, although the interstellar medium becomes more and more opaque to very high wavelengths.
I don't think broadcast radio will ever produce ultra strong signals, even if used by high civilisation...
So, we are more likely to pick up a brief flash of transmission as the beam targetting a moving planet or spacecraft accidentally sweeps over the earth- these events might happen frequently, if the galaxy is highly populated, but rarely from the same direction.

One sign of high civilisation that could be detectable would be infrared emissions from solar power collection swarms or other high intensity industry. The signature should be quite different to , say, a brown dwarf (although the civilisation might be actively hiding).
I've also tried to imagine this search from the perspective of the far future

 

[mejane]

Here's the official seti@home email I received a few days ago (I really should check my email more often):

Dear jane:

This is an exciting time for SETI@home.
On March 18-20 2003 we travel to the Arecibo radio telescope
to re-observe the most promising "candidates" produced by our search so far.
There is a chance that these new observations will yield
the first real evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Thanks for being part of this history-making effort!
According to our records, you have processed 59 work units,
the most recent on January 26, 2003.
Your contribution of computer time to SETI@home is greatly appreciated.
If you have taken a break from SETI@home, now is a great time
to start up again; you can download the latest software at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/download.html


Support SETI@home - Join The Planetary Society
----------------------------------------------
Without the unwavering support of The Planetary Society,
we would not be embarking on this round of re-observations.
We strongly urge all SETI@home users to join The Planetary Society
and help keep our project alive. If you join now, you'll receive a
free poster titled "Is Anybody Out There?" featuring an evocative
image of the millions of stars near the center of our galaxy. Go to:
http://planetary.org/html/member/SETIoffer.html

The Planetary Society supports several different searches for
extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as extra-solar planet research
and many other worthwhile projects. For a look at the full range of
their activities, visit http://planetary.org

Thanks also to our other major sponsors: the University of California,
Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance, Fujifilm Computer Products, and Quantum;
and to individuals around the world who have generously donated to SETI@home:
see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donor.html


Scientific News
---------------
With the help of participants like you, SETI@home has analyzed
about 10,000 hours of data from the Arecibo radio observatory,
producing a database of several billion events
(spikes, Gaussians, pulses, and triplets).
From this database, we have extracted the "candidates" that,
in our judgement, have the greatest likelihood
of coming from an extraterrestrial synthetic source.
The factors in this evaluation include:
- Signal power
- Goodness of fit
- Detection several different times
- Proximity to a nearby star, especially one similar to our Sun.
Our next step is to re-observe the top candidates
by pointing a radio telescope at that location in the sky
and checking for a similar signal.
We applied for telescope time at Arecibo and were granted 24 hours,
in three 8-hour chunks on March 18-20, 2003.
If everything goes well, this will be enough time to re-observe
about 150 candidates.

The re-observations will be done using the main receiver at Arecibo,
which has a smaller beam and greater sensitivity than
the antenna we normally use.
We'll record the re-observations on magnetic tape,
both in our usual format of 2 bits per sample,
and in a higher-resolution format with 8 bits per sample.
Then we'll analyze the recorded data in three ways:

- We'll do a fast analysis using computers at Arecibo;
this will guide us in choosing candidates on which to spend more time.

- We'll analyze the 2-bit data using the current SETI@home client;
this will take place during the week or two after the Arecibo visit.

- We'll analyze the 8-bit data using a new client program
based on BOINC (see below), yielding better sensitivity.
This will take place a month or two after the Arecibo visit.

More information on the re-observation project is here:
http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/


Project News
------------
The re-observation is just one of the things keeping us busy.
We have built a new data recorder capable of handling
the 13-channel multibeam receiver at Parkes in Australia.
This will produce data for our new "Southern SETI@home" project,
which we hope to start later this year if we can raise the necessary funds.
In addition, we are preparing a new distributed computing project,
Astropulse, that will analyze our current SETI@home data,
looking for evidence of evaporating black holes,
fast pulsars, and new types of ET signals.
See http://www.planetary.org/astropulses.html

Our upcoming distributed computing projects will use the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC),
which we are developing with support from the National Science Foundation.
See http://boinc.berkeley.edu.
BOINC will also be used by science research projects in other areas,
such as molecular biology and climate prediction.
BOINC lets you choose how much computer time to devote to each project.
The transition from SETI@home to BOINC will be gradual.
We'll continue to record new data at Arecibo even while BOINC ramps up;
for now you can help us most by continuing to run SETI@home.

Whether or not the re-observations find an ET signal,
SETI@home has been a tremendous success and a lot of fun.
We are very grateful for the participation and enthusiasm
of our users all over the world,
and we look forward to continuing working together
to investigate the mysteries of the universe.


Dr. David P. Anderson
Project Director, SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

I'm now feeling a bit guilty that I haven't run the program for weeks... I generally have too many other things running for the screensaver to kick in. Oh, well. Maybe one of my previous efforts will find ET... hope they're friendly

Jane.

 

[ruffready]

mejane

after reading your post..I think seti might just find something..I mean out of all those possibles..

 

[rynner2]

The Rhythm of SETI: Observing in Real-time
By Peter Backus
SETI Institute
posted: 07:00 am ET
20 March 2003

In real-time SETI, if you miss a beat the dance starts over. If you have to start over, you’ve just wasted precious telescope time and perhaps missed the most important discovery in history. That’s why Project Phoenix follows up on potential Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) signals within minutes of the original detection.

Most SETI programs scan the sky looking for strong signals. Any signals that are deemed interesting are put on a list for follow-up observations weeks, months--even years later. Long delays in verification of potential ET signals sometimes generate tantalizing, but ultimately frustrating, stories. The most famous is the "Wow Signal" detected at the Ohio State University Observatory in 1977. The signal was strong and had many of the characteristics that would be expected from a real ET signal. Over the quarter century since the detection, multiple attempts with greater sensitivity have found nothing. Yet for some people, the mystery remains.

The SETI program developed as NASA’s Targeted Search, and carried on by the SETI Institute as Project Phoenix, is designed to eliminate such mysterious signals. This program observes Sun-like stars for relatively long periods of time at a wide range of frequencies and for a variety of signal types. The result is the most sensitive and comprehensive search ever conducted. Engineers and scientists developed a system of computers that collect and analyze data, and then immediately test any potential ET signals. This entire process is highly automated and choreographed by sophisticated control software. Human experience and judgment have been encoded in software to make rapid decisions about the signals detected, because signals are detected.

Since the technological, radio-communicating civilizations we seek could be many light years away, it is a safe bet that we will detect our own, terrestrial, radio signals. The challenge is to quickly determine whether a signal is coming from the direction of the star we’re observing or from somewhere near the Earth.

To determine whether a signal is coming from a particular star, we exploit a rhythm of our solar system, the daily rotation of the Earth. Our primary telescope, Arecibo Observatory, is at latitude 18 degrees and so moves at a speed of about 987 miles per hour (1579 kph). This motion causes a changing but very predictable Doppler shift in the frequency of a signal that would be coming from a star. Another observatory would have a different Doppler shift relative to the star. In our project, we use the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. At latitude 53 degrees, JBO’s telescope moves at about 624 miles per hours (999 kph). The relative velocities between the telescopes and the star change, and the rates of change are different at the two telescopes. This is a very predictable result of the Earth’s daily dance, and it causes a signature frequency waltz in an ET signal.

So far, the signals we’ve detected are of the "two left feet" variety—none has yet displayed the cosmic Doppler dance of a genuine ET signal. As we complete Project Phoenix by mid 2004 and then move to the Allen Telescope Array, our searches will continue to process data in real time. The beat goes on.

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[Anonymous]

Decoding

never bothered with any of it.seems to me its a bit convenient to me as the very same tec could be used to spy on other nations
nice reason to spend millions on radio telescopes .always thought
its just as likely that et uses gama rays. possibly explaning all the gama ray bursts detected these would have the energy needed to travel long distances without becoming to faint.has anyone ever tryed to decode read them at all?

 

[SoundDust]

Seti draws a blank

A search for intelligent life in space has drawn a blank.

Scientists have found no signs of alien beings after analysing radio signals collected in the world's biggest distributed computing project.

More than 150 candidates selected by the Seti@home project have been examined using the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

 

[ruffready]

well

maybe God only put people here on earth 6,000 years ago.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Decoding

never bothered with any of it.seems to me its a bit convenient to me as the very same tec could be used to spy on other nations
nice reason to spend millions on radio telescopes .always thought
its just as likely that et uses gama rays. possibly explaning all the gama ray bursts detected these would have the energy needed to travel long distances without becoming to faint.has anyone ever tryed to decode read them at all?

I suspect that gamma rays are not the best means for interstellar data transmission. In a number of respects gamma rays would be more prone to "interference" than radio, for example any with an energy greater than 2*511 eV would be prone to pair-production on interaction with matter. In addition, for a given transmitter power, the signal is also likely to suffer significant photon noise effects because the energy per photon is so much greater.

 

[Anonymous]

both your points are of technical nature so its possible that we ourselves my one day be able to overcome them.
it still stands that radio would become to weak to use as a reliable means of communication with another solar system.
dont nasa use microwaves to comunicate with space probes?

 

[Anonymous]

light

whats the chances of light being used as a form of comunication?
possibly it would be transmitted as one colour nowing the distances involved to compensate for red shift to ensure the correct recived spectrum so the reciver only waches for an exact colour?
would this from have too much interference is there a colour that isnt very common in the night sky?