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."

Comments

Re:Should we be concerned...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Link text: my pet peeve

[p3d0]

Please don't get too creative with what text you put in your hyperlinks. It makes it hard to tell where the links go. Hint: look at the Related Links box, and if it's totally nonsensical, your links need work.

Let's look at the links in this article:

• "skymap" points to the astrobio article
• "most promising" points to the skymap
• "project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
• "these" points to a description of the signals SETI@home looks for

Here's my suggestion:

"An Astrobiology Magazine article today presents the skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project that produced it. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit the most promising 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."