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SETI@Home Publishes Skymap
An anonymous reader writes "The skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals is reported today, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit these spikes, pulses, and steady signals, focused on 166 star candidates. Those 166 were pruned from the five billion signals that have been found since 1999, depending on the signal's persistence, closeness to a known star, and frequency. The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."
I'd like to point out that it's the green/orange squares that are candidate systems. The blue bell curve is the Milky Way distorted because it's an inverse sphere laid onto a square.
As for the century long delay, just start talking. Wicked lag time, but eventually you'll get something said.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
actually the "bell curve" effect is the effect of the "plane" of the milky way intersecting with a cylinder (distorted on either end in this projection). The cylinder is "unwrapped" , thus the plane appears as a sinusoid due to the intersection angle of the galactic plane.
It is also interesting that the radio telscope can only tract objects in a band across the sky, due to physical limitations of a ground based radio telescope. This "can" mean that there are as many as ~4 times as many potential signals out there (since they don't line up with the galactic plane we can assume they are nearby star systems which are scattered about the plane).
How could it have increased?
Perhaps the signal is from an object like a pulsar that is increasing in mass near its center and increasing its rate of spin a'la conservation of angular momentum? After all the first time a pulsar was discovered, it was thought to be "little green men".
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think the idea is that an alien civilization would have measurably increased their radio output during the two observation points, not that they would have done it as a reaction to us.
They refuse to make ANY updates to the original client (written for 386) because they feel it will somehow invalidate all of the previous data.
oh, and also "Liftering" as opposed to "filtering".
Table-ized A.I.
While Rc5 was very popular, it was only really amongst us geeks. Seti@home has attracted a LOT of attention over the years, and now A LOT of non-technical PC users know what it is and what distributed computing is.
However, to be more consistent with popular media science measurement systems, we would more correctly say that a sheet of interstellar space the size of a football field and the thickness of a human hair would contain about 3000 atoms.
Well, it could be argued that Zahn's books are far better than the last two movies that Lucas has made...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Seriously, I have problems picking up TV stations at all without cable, and the broadcast is only ~20 miles away (over hilly terrain). Granted I don't have the best antenna, but we're talking about lightyears here. The only signal I pick up reliably is the Sun (just tune your TV to some random station, it comes in quite clear, channel 8 works pretty well for me). Alas, I find little evidence of intelligent life on cable either. Its all random noise.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life. These stars are neither too hot (too close) nor too cold (too far) for life to form. This happy middle ground is also known as the Goldilocks zone.
Fp is the fraction of those stars with planets. Planets normally form only around stars. Some solar system have no planets and hence very little chance of having life as we know it.
All life is dependent on energy is some form or another. For most life on this planet, that energy is the sun in the forms of light and heat. While other forms of energy have been found to sustain life like chemosynthesis in the deep ocean trenches, this phenomenom will be nearly impossible to detect from earth. It is far easier to detect stars, but that doesn't mean locating a signal will be a breeze.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Let's look at the links in this article:
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"skymap" points to the astrobio article
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"most promising" points to the skymap
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"project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
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"these" points to a description of the signals SETI@home looks for
Here's my suggestion:Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I leave my machines running 24x7 - so I don't see how extra CPU cycles will make a huge difference to my power bill
Let's just look at the CPU. CPUs have millions of transistors (a Pentium 4 has ~42 million), and each transistor is an electronic switch. The transistor technology they use is Field Effect or "FET". The most common would be "MOSFET". To maintain the state of the switch as ON or OFF, the device holds a small charge (positive or negative depending on the device) and the charge acts to "pinch off" the channel for current to flow, or to open the channel, as the case may be.
While a transistor is just sitting there in a particular ON or OFF state, it uses very little electricity. However, to change the state, you have to either charge or discharge the gate. When you charge or discharge it, this results in a small but finite amount of current flow, and there being resistance in metal and silicon, this results in power being consumed (at a rate of the current squared, times the resistance). So a transistor that is constantly switching will consume power, but a transistor not switching will consume very, very little.
So, if you home computer is just sitting there doing nothing, then it isn't using most of the chip, and the transistors just sit there waiting for the next instruction to execute. However, when you're running SETI @ Home, the CPU is constantly crunching numbers, and the transistors are constantly switching.
If you want to see this yourself, run a temperature monitor on the CPU while it's not doing anything, and then when you run SETI@Home or DOOM. You'll notice that the temperature spikes when it's doing something, and this is just used up energy. If you have electric heat in your house, and live in a cold climate all year long, you may not see the difference on your power bill, but I don't think that applies to most of us.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
A search on google under "chemosynthesis" will find some articles on this phenomenom. Bacteria the base form of life that is directly dependent on chemicals that spew out of the trenches. All other forms near the trenches are in some way dependent on them like most of the food chain on the surface is indirectly dependent on plants.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Sorry, but cepstral techniques don't do what the SETI people need them to do. The de-chirping needs to happen coherently (i.e. without any loss of the phase information from the original data and signals that it might contain). The reason for this is that the signal-to-noise of a detected periodic signal is much less if you use an incoherent technique like the cepstrum rather than a coherent one. And since they are looking for very weak signals, they need every bit of S/N that they can get.
OTOH, I have developed a cepstral-like technique to detect binary pulsars in data almost identical to the SETI@home data. You can read about it here or here if you are interested.