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SETI Goes to Arecibo To Stat *Candidates*

Posted by Hemos on from the peering-into-the-future dept.

Neuropol writes "In the most rescent Seti@home news letter. Seti recieved (only!) 24 hours of telescope time at Arecibo to investigate interesting points in the sky where signals have not only shown up once but several times in data crunches in the last 4 years. The Planetary Society web site has an excellent summary of the reobservations. The Seti web site lists the reobservation targets and the 7,000 users whose computations directly contributed to finding them."

6 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. i thought by Madcapjack · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought that I had read a couple weeks ago that the SETI reinvestigations had turned up nothing. I think i read this on google news...

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  2. what if they missed it by MoFoYa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    the 24 hrs were broken into 3 sets of 8 hrs. during the first set they reobserved 80something targets. passing over the area near each for a short time. so, ~10 targets an hr is about 6min each.

    what if the aliens took a 10 min break?

    or what if whatever organization on the alien world that signals to us was only allowed 1 day, and it was yesterday.

    a place as big as the universe could be constantly monitored for 1000's of years, and may still come up with nothing.

  3. Re:exactly what i was wondering by AlecC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mostly, they just observe what happens to be above as the earth turns. They can effectively move the viewing position by two degrees either way by moging the position of the receiver across the focus, and the tilt of the earths axis "nods" the view up and down over the year, so in a year they get to see about half the total sky. Lokk at the maps on the Seti@home page to see what they can see.

    For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.

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    Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
  4. This is old news by MoobY · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The reobservations have been done halfway March (which is stated on the page that is linked too), so this is not really *news*. For now, there do not seem to be any interesting results from these reobservations.

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    1. Re:This is old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Although I'm a seti@home fan, and have cranked out nearly 500 workunits since I started in mid-March, I'm a bit concerned about the dearth of other news.

      Can anyone say anything about the status of the Parkes, Australia observations? There are a number of pages on the seti@home web site that appear to have been written a year or two ago, talking about what's going to happen in early 2003...

      It would be interesting for the seti@home crew to get some time at both Arecibo and Parkes (and elsewhere, for that matter) when their respective dishes/'scopes are pointed at the moon, just to see how much crap at 1420MHz is being generated on Earth and is being bounced back to us by the moon!
      (Actually, come to think of it, it would be an interesting instrument calibration exercise).

      Of course, having a few hams pounding out some "CQ EME" on 1296 at the same time might be fun, too.

  5. Patterns...... by PS-SCUD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Please don't mod this a troll because It's not.

    I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.

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    "Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman