SETI Project Scientist Discusses Prospects

An anonymous reader writes "Today Astrobiology Magazine interviewed SETI@home Project Scientist, Dan Wertheimer, about subjects including the first detailed 'best of SETI' candidate reobservations for repeating telescope acquisition on the most promising 166 star candidates. Their policy is not to release precise sky coordinates on the best ones yet (so far a signal called SHGb11+15a), with this type of Gaussian signal shape. The candidates number some 400 million Gaussians and 5.7 billion spikes."

Comments

Re:Did I find one?

[zeux]

They do.

here.

Click on each of the signals.

Re:I used to run seti@home

[QuasiCoLtd]

Try upwards of 25%! On my 1.6GHz Win XP machine with screen saver client it would take approx. 20 hours for one WU. With command line that number is reduced to 4 hours. I haven't tested a pure Linux command line yet (no X server running).

Re:I wish they would release the data

[Space cowboy]

Yes, it's a real radio telescope - they're pretty simple beasts really. Big dish, tuned receiver at the right frequency (or a frequency-converter, and a normal radio receiver), and a computer at the other end.

I use a WinRadio (despite the name, it's a universal box :-) external receiver tuned to the Water Hole frequencies (the gap between the OH line and the H2 line in the radio spectrum, at around 1420 MHz - pretty typical for radio astronomy, it's a relatively quiet part of the spectrum.

Simon

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[mprinkey]

A "pea" travelling at 90% of the speed of light contains a lot of kinetic energy. Say, 0.01 grams for the pea at 2.7e8 m/s. That works out to 7.3e11 J. That is about the same energy as exploding 175 tons of TNT per pea.

Set aside the issue of engineering the "peashooter" to fire them, you are talking about throwing some potentially destructive material at a neighboring star system. Firing them continuously looks like you intentially want to hit something. I think this might be a bad idea from a "just saying hello" viewpoint.

Re:Copyright on the Data

[kramer]

No.

You can't copyright something you didn't write. Not counting works for hire and such -- but if they're claiming that they have aliens in far away galaxies working for them, they've got worse problems than copyright infringement.

Re:I wish they would release the data

[jridley]

In fact, you don't even need a dish. The first radio telescopes were just dipoles. You can google around and find tons of descriptions of how to build radio telescopes on the cheap. It's particularly easy now with computers interfaced to radios.

We can't "see" planets very well yet

[ianscot]

The more than 100 known extrasolar planets are mostly whoppers, 'cause we're mostly still looking for cases in which a planet's big enough to cause the light coming from a star to wobble. (Exceptions involve cases like Vega -- it's got a dust field around it, and the computer models say the best explanation for how that dust looks is a Neptune-sized planet in about Neptune's orbit. Again, it's a planet discovered indirectly, by inferring things about its gravity.)

None of the known extrasolar planets are supposed to be particularly good candidates for life, though that Vega case maybe indicates a solar system a little like ours, with rocky planets in the interior orbits... or that's the speculation.

We've still got a ways to go in refining our way of just looking for the things. To narrow any search based on them would be premature.