As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
SETI@home, the pioneering distributed-computing task released in 1999 that employed countless volunteers to examine radio signals from area, produced some 12 billion detections– short bursts of energy that stuck out from background sound– as it combed through observations taped at the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley have actually now narrowed the dataset to about 100 signals that warrant follow-up with effective radio telescopes.
A screenshot of the SETI@home interface on a desktop in 2009. Image credit: Robert Sanders/ UC Berkeley.
In between 1999 and 2020, countless individuals around the world lent the SETI@home task their personal computer to look for indications of sophisticated civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy.
They downloaded the SETI@home software application to their computer systems and permitted it to evaluate information taped at the Arecibo Observatory to discover uncommon radio signals from area.
All informed, these calculations produced 12 billion detections.
After 10 years of work, the SETI@home group has actually now completed examining those detections, winnowing them down to about a million prospect signals and after that to 100 that deserve a review.
“SETI@home is a radio SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) task, which looked for numerous kinds of signals in taped information,” stated SETI@home job co-founder Dr. David Anderson, a computer system researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Most of this information was tape-recorded commensally at the Arecibo Observatory over a 22-year duration.”
“Other information from the Parkes and Green Bank observatories was offered by Breakthrough Listen effort.”
“Most radio SETI jobs process information in near real-time utilizing unique function analyzers at the telescope.”
“SETI@home takes a various method: it tapes digital time-domain (likewise called baseband) information, and disperses it online to great deals of computer systems that process the information, utilizing both CPUs and GPUs.”
The appealing SETI@home signals are presently being re-observed with China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to see whether any repeat or display qualities irregular with sound.
“I’m not anticipating to discover an authentic extraterrestrial signal,” Dr. Anderson stated.
“If there were a signal above a particular power, we would have discovered it.”
SETI@home’s multistage analysis, explained in 2 documents in the Huge Journalprovides both a technical roadmap and a cautionary tale for future technosignature hunts.
The very first of these documents detailed how the job’s dispersed network of personal computer used sophisticated signal processing to raw time-domain radio information, utilizing methods such as discrete Fourier changes to look for frequency patterns that may betray a consistent extraterrestrial beacon.
A follow-up paper concentrated on the complex job of differentiating possible signals from the frustrating background of terrestrial disturbance– from satellites, broadcast stations and even microwave– by determining clusters of detections constant with origin from a single sky place over several observations.
Future efforts might broaden on the SETI@home design by dispersing brand-new telescope datasets through platforms like BOINC– the volunteer computing facilities that SETI@home assisted leader– to get public processing power once again, this time with more advanced tools and faster networks.
“I believe it still catches individuals’s creativity to search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” stated SETI@home job director Dr. Eric Korpela, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I believe that you might still get considerably more processing power than we utilized for SETI@home and procedure more information since of a broader web bandwidth.”
“The most significant concern with such a task is that it needs workers, and workers indicates wages. It’s not the most inexpensive method to do SETI.”
_____
David P. Anderson et al2025. SETI@home: Data Analysis and Findings. AJ 170, 111; doi: 10.3847/ 1538-3881/ ade5ab
E.J. Korpela et al2025. SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-end Processing. AJ 170, 112; doi: 10.3847/ 1538-3881/ ade5a7
Find out more
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
