SETI@home data has been analyzed; radio telescope now being pointed at the 100 'best' potential signals

essentialsaltes said:

Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET—scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found​

(story from January)

All told, these computations produced 12 billion detections—"momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky," according to computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson.

After 10 years of work, the SETI@home team has now finished analyzing those detections, winnowing them down to about a million "candidate" signals and then to 100 that are worth a second look. They have been pointing China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

Though the FAST data are not yet analyzed, Anderson admits he doesn't expect to find a signal from ET. But the results of the SETI@home project—presented in twopapers published last year in The Astronomical Journal—provide lessons for future searches and point to potential flaws in ongoing searches.

Despite its failure to find ET, was SETI@home a success?

"I'd say it went way, way, way beyond our initial expectations," Anderson said. "When we were designing SETI@home, we tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science.Our calculations were based on getting 50,000 volunteers. Pretty quickly, we had a million volunteers. It was kind of cool, and I would like to let that community and the world know that we actually did some science."

Most current SETI searches—including the 10-year-old Breakthrough Listen project—are targeted searches rather than all-sky scans. That is, they look for technosignatures from specific nearby stars or more distant stars that have been found to harbor planets. The radio telescopes used, such as the Greenbank Telescope in West Virginia and the MeerKAT array in South Africa, are still only capable of detecting an Arecibo-sized transmitter relatively nearby, in galactic terms.

Click to expand...

essentialsaltes said:

Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET—scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found​

(story from January)

All told, these computations produced 12 billion detections—"momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky," according to computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson.

After 10 years of work, the SETI@home team has now finished analyzing those detections, winnowing them down to about a million "candidate" signals and then to 100 that are worth a second look. They have been pointing China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

Though the FAST data are not yet analyzed, Anderson admits he doesn't expect to find a signal from ET. But the results of the SETI@home project—presented in twopapers published last year in The Astronomical Journal—provide lessons for future searches and point to potential flaws in ongoing searches.

Despite its failure to find ET, was SETI@home a success?

"I'd say it went way, way, way beyond our initial expectations," Anderson said. "When we were designing SETI@home, we tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science.Our calculations were based on getting 50,000 volunteers. Pretty quickly, we had a million volunteers. It was kind of cool, and I would like to let that community and the world know that we actually did some science."

Most current SETI searches—including the 10-year-old Breakthrough Listen project—are targeted searches rather than all-sky scans. That is, they look for technosignatures from specific nearby stars or more distant stars that have been found to harbor planets. The radio telescopes used, such as the Greenbank Telescope in West Virginia and the MeerKAT array in South Africa, are still only capable of detecting an Arecibo-sized transmitter relatively nearby, in galactic terms.

Click to expand...