Scientific News
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With the help of participants like you, SETI@home has analyzed
about 10,000 hours of data from the Arecibo radio observatory,
producing a database of several billion events
(spikes, Gaussians, pulses, and triplets).
From this database, we have extracted the "candidates" that,
in our judgement, have the greatest likelihood
of coming from an extraterrestrial synthetic source.
The factors in this evaluation include:
- Signal power
- Goodness of fit
- Detection several different times
- Proximity to a nearby star, especially one similar to our Sun.
Our next step is to re-observe the top candidates
by pointing a radio telescope at that location in the sky
and checking for a similar signal.
We applied for telescope time at Arecibo and were granted 24 hours,
in three 8-hour chunks on March 18-20, 2003.
If everything goes well, this will be enough time to re-observe
about 150 candidates.
