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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."
They do.
here.
Click on each of the signals.
Iraq: war to save the U
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).
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.
:-) 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.
I use a WinRadio (despite the name, it's a universal box
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.