As SFT reported earlier, SETI@home scientists planned to visit the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for three days in March to re-examine the most promising signal candidates obtained from the billions they have collected and analyzed over the past four years. Up to date coverage provided by the Planetary Society reports that the SETI@home team completed the first of its three 8-hour observation sessions yesterday, having directed the telescope to the locations of 52 of their most promising signal candidates as well as 30 stars known to have extrasolar planets, obtained from a list provided by famed planet hunter Geoff Marcy. Chief scientist Dan Werthimer said, “Quick looks at the data don’t show any signs of ET, but we are only doing very preliminary analysis here.” All the reobservation data is being sent back to SETI@home headquarters in Berkeley, California, for further analysis.
However, the final two observation sessions had to be postponed due to the eruption of a solar flare. For the next few days, the Arecibo radio telescope will be used to track this rare event on the Sun. “It looks like we and everybody else using the telescope from now though the weekend is getting bumped,” Werthimer said. “We can still oberve a bit for tomorrow, but only two hours. We are getting bumped because of a solar flare. They need to reschedule us for early next week, so we probably won’t get the observing finished until Tuesday next week. This is rare–happens once every two years that they have to bump everyone so they can observe a flare. The schedule is still tentative.”
Once all the reobservations have been collected, full analysis will take several weeks. However, SETI@home scientists will already have a good idea if they have found something significant or not, thanks to the SERENDIP IV–the 168 million channel SETI spectrometer that piggy-backs on the Arecibo radio telescope and processes data in real-time. SETI@home’s unlimited computing power allows for a more sensitive analysis than what is possible with SERENDIP, however SERENDIP scans a far wider frequency band around the hydrogen line (considered the most likely band for intentional interstellar transmissions)–100 MHz versus the 2.5 MHz SETI@home analyzes.