Setty@Home to validate billions of incoming signal candidates

SETI@home is a project to find extraterrestrial intellectual life by using free PC resources connected to the Internet, but on March 31, it ended the data analysis process conducted through volunteer computing. However, the project continues to verify the billions of extraterrestrial signal candidates handed down from volunteer PCs around the world.

In the next phase of the project starting now, the task of distributing whether the signal contained in the 15TB data gathered from PCs around the world is from Earth or not. The criterion of measurement is whether the detected signal is still there a few months later, for example, the signal from a radar system is observed in many places in the sky, but it is not persistent. Therefore, if the signal is observed in the same place at a certain interval, the possibility of an extraterrestrial life increases to some extent.

As Seti@Home enters the next stage, the SETI Institute is planning to explore extraterrestrial intellectual life using the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory made up of 27 giant Parabolic Anthera in New Mexico in cooperation with the National Radio Observatory. An interface COSMIC (Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster) that collects raw data from this Antera array is also being developed. This will be the first seti-only device to connect to VLA.

With COSMIC, even when the antenna is used for other observation purposes, up to 300 GB/sec of raw data can be acquired from the side to find signals of extraterrestrial intelligent life in real time. The software developed for the COSMIC system is open source and can be used by other astronomers. COSMIC is currently delaying its plans due to the spread of Corona 19 infection, but plans to deploy it to VLA within this year. Related information can be found here .