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

Should we be concerned...

[bc90021]

...that even alien signals so nicely fit a bell curve? Does this mean the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence will be largely disappointing? ;)

Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redundant

[js7a]

the SETI@home screensaver analyzes the data many times over trying a great variety of possible doppler accelerations. Actually, the screensaver first takes the raw data and mathematically "undoes" a specific doppler acceleration or "chirp". It then feeds the resulting "de-accelerated" data to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines. This is called "De-chirping" the data. SETI@home tries to do this at many points between -50 Hz/sec to +50 Hz/sec. At the finest frequency resolution of 0.075 Hz we check for 5409 different chirp rates between -10 Hz/sec and +10 Hz/sec!

-- "About the SETI@Home screensaver

That seems horribly inefficient!

Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral techniques?

There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.

What a waste of all those CPU cycles!

Will governments allow news to come out?

[civilengineer]

Supposing SETI finds something, will the government let out the news to the general public? What about all the historical cases of UFO sightings? Apart from constantly gazing at skies, should we also not try to demand opening up of all classified government documents about any possible UFO sighting?

Re: Will governments allow news to come out?

[Black Parrot]

> Supposing SETI finds something, will the government let out the news to the general public?

Why would governments keep it secret when they could instead use it as a long-distance boogieman to justify increasing defense spending and cracking down on civil liberties?

A little OT but

[geeveees]

Why do we always assume that the aliens will be more advanced than us? How do we know we won't be visiting alien planets and abduct its inhabitants? Just a little something to think about...

Re:A little OT but

[Gorobei]

We assume aliens will do the same exponential technology advance that we are doing.

If life is common, the vast bulk will be single-cell goop, lichen, etc. The ones that go multi-cellular have a shot at intelligent species. Get intelligent, and you have fire, the wheel, and radio in short order.

The human race has had radio for 100 years or so: if we detect a signal from aliens, chances are that they have had radio for thousands or millions of years. We are almost certain to be the primitives in this case.

Interestingly, the radio age is probably extremely short-lived: signal compression, etc, should make any advanced race's radio look like noise to observers.

Re:Proximity to a star?

[MuParadigm]

They're assuming that any species capable of producing a radio signal has evolved on in an environment capable of providing the tools to do so. That pretty much leaves: planets.

Planets, as far our theories go, are generally formed during the creation of stars and seem to generally be captured in orbit around stars. (Of course, I doubt anyone has made a wide search for planets not close to stars.)

Thus, to look for life, look near stars.

The WOW signal

[198348726583297634]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the WOW signal. read the link..it'll send chills down yer spine!

Up in the air

[nimblebrain]

I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.

The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society

Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques underway.

I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).

I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?