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David Anderson, co-creator of SETI@home, pictured in 2003.
(Image credit: Robert Sanders/UC Berkeley.)
Astronomers are the use of China’s distinguished FAST radio telescope to trip after 100 fascinating signals detected by the SETI@home mission, which is rush by SETI (Survey for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists.
SETI@home, which ran from 1999 to 2020, had millions of customers all around the world donating their CPU time to downloadable software that churned via files level-headed by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Within the finish, 12 billion candidate narrowband signals believe been spotted. These signals appeared as “momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky,” David Anderson, a pc scientist on the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of the SETI@home mission, acknowledged in a assertion.
But irrespective of their beginning keep, they checklist the culmination of one of the largest citizen science initiatives ever undertaken. It is taken years to determine techniques to properly peek this immense amount of files.
“Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” acknowledged Anderson. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.”
SETI@home chanced on 12 billion narrowband radio signals, which believe been whittled down to the final 100 for follow-up observations. (Image credit: Robert Sanders/UC Berkeley.)
“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” added Berkeley astronomer Eric Korpela, who co-based SETI@home alongside with Anderson and Dan Werthimer, who is an astronomer and electrical engineer also at Berkeley.
In the end, on the supercomputer facilities of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, algorithms designed to contrivance RFI sorted the wheat from the chaff, cutting back those 12 billion to 1 million, then 1,000. These 1,000 signals then had to be inspected manually, by gaze, before being whittled down to 100 that deserved a second seek for.
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Arecibo had been the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, with a 305-meter aperture, till FAST came alongside in 2016. Because Arecibo collapsed and was destroyed in December 2020, FAST is now the best radio telescope capable of taking up these candidate signals.
The Arecibo radio telescope, the keep the suggestions for SETI@home was taken. (Image credit: H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF.)
“If we don’t find ET, what we can say is that we have established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it,” acknowledged Anderson.
The scale of the mission has gone some distance beyond the needs of Anderson or anyone on his group when SETI@home began in 1999. They notion they would maybe well also bag 50,000 customers within the event that they believe been lucky. By the finish of the major week they had 200,000 customers, and within a 300 and sixty five days they had 2 million.
“I’d say it went way, way beyond our initial expectations,” acknowledged Anderson.
The files for SETI@home came from piggybacking on Arecibo’s traditional immense observations, and covered billions and billions of stars within the Milky Plan.
“We are, without doubt, the most sensitive narrowband search of large portions of the sky, so we had the best chance of finding something,” acknowledged Korpela. “So yeah, there’s a little disappointment that we didn’t see anything.”
Because the mountainous mission nears its finish, assuming no precise extraterrestrial signals turn up within the final 100 candidates, Korpela appears to be like assist on the mission not honest with satisfaction nonetheless as a learning trip for future SETI surveys.
“We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding,” he acknowledged. “Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere. In a world where I had the money, I would reanalyze it the right way, meaning I’d fix the mistakes that we made. And we did make some mistakes. These were conscious choices because of how fast computers were in 1999.”
Indeed, Korpela wonders whether or not one day a new mission could maybe well also be launched within the an analogous vein as SETI@home to fling seeking to accumulate over the total files again nonetheless with long-established crowd-sourced computing vitality and machine learning in search of the rest that was missed the major time around.
“There’s still the potential that ET is in that data and we missed it just by a hair.”
The total results from SETI@home presented in two papers in 2025 in The Big Journal: one paper on files analysis and findings, and one other on files acquisition and processing.
Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor within the United Kingdom, and has a stage in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He is the creator of “The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, home, physics and astrobiology for a mess of magazines and web sites.
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