SETI@home Signal Story Sees Much More Than Meets the Eye

[kai_25]

A recent article in New Scientist magazine, entitled “ Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away,” implies that the UC Berkeley <br />Alas, this story is misleading. According to Dan Werthimer, who heads up the UC Berkeley SERENDIP SETI project, this is a case of a reporter failing to understand the workings of their search. He says that misquotes and statements taken out of context give the impression that his team is exceptionally impressed with one of the many candidate signals, SHGb02+14a, uncovered using the popular <a href="mailto:SETI@home" />SETI@home</a> software. They are not.<br /><br />This signal has been found twice by folks using the downloadable screen saver. That fact resulted in the UC Berkeley team putting it on their list of ‘best candidates’. Keep in mind that <a href="mailto:SETI@home" />SETI@home</a> produces 15 million signal reports each day. How can one possibly sort through this enormous flood of data to sift out signals that might be truly extraterrestrial, rather than merely noise artifacts or man-made interference?<br /><br />The scheme used is simple in principle (although the technical details are complex): <a href="mailto:SETI@home" />SETI@home</a> data come from a receiver on the Arecibo radio telescope that is incessantly panning the sky, riding “piggyback” on other astronomical observations. Every few seconds, it sweeps another patch of celestial real estate, and records data covering many millions of frequency channels. Some of these data are then distributed for processing by the screen saver. By chance, the telescope will sweep the same sky patch every six months or so. If a signal is persistent – that is to say, it shows up more than once when the telescope is pointed at the same place, and at the same frequency (af