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SETI@home Users Get More Signals to Analyze
By Associated Press
posted: 12:35 pm ET
28 March 2003
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Untitled SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Scientists finished a three-day session searching for life in space with the world's premier radio telescope, saying they found nothing but came away with new data to analyze. The scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, observed and recorded 227 "candidate'' radio signals, astronomer and team leader Dan Werthimer said Tuesday. The signals examined included 166 gleaned by home computer users worldwide who have installed a special screen saver that analyzes data from the telescope. Now volunteers in the program called SETI@home will be using their computers to analyze the latest signals gathered at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory. "We're going to be sending this data out to volunteers around the world,'' Werthimer said. SETI@home is a separate extraterrestrial search effort from the SETI Institute, a group that pursues several scientific and education projects aimed at the discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. More than 4 million volunteers have installed the SETI@home screen saver and have already donated more than 1 million years of idle processing power to sift through data on billions of potential radio signals. The project is one of several efforts under SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Analyzing the new data will take a couple of months, Werthimer said. With astrophysicist Eric Korpela and physics graduate student Paul Demorest, Werthimer had been scheduled to use the radio telescope last week from Tuesday through Thursday. But a solar flare interrupted the work last Wednesday, forcing the SETI team to postpone work as other scientists studied the flare. The team concluded its work on Monday. The 1,000-foot-wide (300-meter) dish, set in a sinkhole amid hills near Puerto Rico's north-coast town of Arecibo, is the largest single-dish radio telescope on Earth. It is owned by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by Cornell University. NOTE: SPACE.com has a partnership with the SETI Institute.
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