1) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Peptides, Vital to Life, Form Readily From Amino Acids (Message 2108369) Posted 11 Oct 2022 by Jon Golding Post: Although "breaking against a shore" implies that exoplanets with moons capable of creating tides might be necessary or desirable.

2) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Possible Extraterrestrial Signal Reported From Kepler 438 (Message 2101502) Posted 18 Jun 2022 by Jon Golding Post: BLC-1 was another 'technosignature' that held our attention. However, closer examination ruled it out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01508-8. Let's hope this one from FAST is the real deal.

3) Message boards : SETI@home Science : The SKA is GO! (Message 2067832) Posted 7 Feb 2021 by Jon Golding Post: Unfortunately, by the time they build it, the sky will be crowded with noisy mini satellites that make radioastronomy difficult. Maybe later in the century they'll build something similar on the dark side of the moon.

4) Message boards : Politics : The Donald Trump thread part VI - aka "Keep it clean" (Message 2065299) Posted 9 Jan 2021 by Jon Golding Post: Unfortunately, you're completely correct. If Biden is assassinated, Trump remains in power and will initiate martial law - no further elections and direct control from the WH. Bye, bye democracy.

5) Message boards : Nebula : Rethinking RFI algorithms (Message 2058928) Posted 11 Oct 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Excellent point about the drift of stellar position. Presumably not an issue for targeted observations of the same star over time, but could certainly affect basket-weave scans. You might also expect the search sensitivity to improve over time, as new equipment comes along, and I'm unaware whether that has been considered. I suspect these data will be analysed and re-analysed for years to come as new ideas and algorithms come along. Hopefully, there's something in there just waiting to be discovered....

6) Message boards : Nebula : Rethinking RFI algorithms (Message 2058462) Posted 6 Oct 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Not really expecting an answer to this (as it would obviously take the novelty off any paper or announcement), but are you seeing any consistent 'hotspots' in any regions of the sky from the complete run?

7) Message boards : Nebula : Observations on observation (Message 2051756) Posted 13 Jun 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Is this new approach specific to Arecibo data, or is it sufficiently generic to work with data from other radio telescopes too (Green Bank and Parkes)?

8) Message boards : Nebula : External design review (Message 2050170) Posted 23 May 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Are similar design review meetings planned to look at the other functions (RFI removal, etc.)? Great to know that the external experts broadly agree with your solutions to date and are able to bring in further refinements. Getting closer to ET with each step.

9) Message boards : Nebula : Estimating sensitivity (Message 2036930) Posted 9 Mar 2020 by Jon Golding Post: I'm guessing that the receiving hardware had several updates over the 20 years of this project, to make incremental improvements to the signal detection sensitivity. Perhaps (unfortunately) that's yet another parameter that needs to be taken into account? More recent observations of a pixel will have a greater sensitivity than older observations, so WU results need to be binned according to the available sensitivity at the epoch they were recorded. Moreover, several pixels were recorded by different antennas (Arecibo, Green Bank, etc.), each of which has intrinsically different sensitivities, probably at different wavelengths too. The whole analysis becomes hideously complex. No wonder you need to switch off work units to allow full-time work on the data analysis.

10) Message boards : News : SETI@home hibernation (Message 2035649) Posted 4 Mar 2020 by Jon Golding Post: And just as I thought we were going to get data from Parkes and maybe FAST to crunch, to cover the Southern sky. Still, the Nebula analysis will hopefully reveal a handful of candidates for follow-up and we may be called on in the future to crunch again! In the meantime, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will have a field day with the apparent *shutdown* of SETI@home :-(

11) Message boards : SETI@home Science : SETI@home in the News (Message 2033279) Posted 21 Feb 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Source paper is here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.10275.pdf

12) Message boards : Nebula : All in the timing, part deux (Message 2026953) Posted 9 Jan 2020 by Jon Golding Post: Thanks Bob I've seen these tables before for each new version of Nebula. However, I'd never taken the time to see if there are any regions that are consistently high scoring (which is the whole point of what Nebula does). Guess I was jumping ahead with my curiosity before any paper/announcement is made. Jon

13) Message boards : Nebula : All in the timing, part deux (Message 2026780) Posted 8 Jan 2020 by Jon Golding Post: With these various iterations of Nebula, are you beginning to see consistent regions of the sky that get flagged as interesting for follow-up?

14) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Earth-like exoplanets may be common, study says. (Message 2016763) Posted 26 Oct 2019 by Jon Golding Post: A thought provoking discussion of the Fermi paradox is in this paper from 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 It suggests that we could be the only detectable species in the universe (using our current technology). Obviously, I hope that's not the case.

15) Message boards : Nebula : Is Nebula too pixel-centric? (Message 2014142) Posted 4 Oct 2019 by Jon Golding Post: I'd always assumed the pixel was the unitary unit, but now it seems WUs are compared according to their position within a pixel. Is this perhaps an argument to have a smaller pixel size and then not worry about within-pixel differences?

16) Message boards : SETI Perspectives : Seeing the Unseeable: The Black Hole Image (Message 2001407) Posted 6 Jul 2019 by Jon Golding Post: I'm assuming that the slightly pentagonal shape of the ring of light around this black hole is simply an artefact of the data processing?

17) Message boards : SETI Perspectives : Coming of Age for Optical SETI (Message 1993467) Posted 11 May 2019 by Jon Golding Post: Thank you for this very interesting article. You mentioned a time-scale of around 2 years to build two separated observatories, but when do you hope to have 'first light' for the first component detector of the first observatory?

18) Message boards : Nebula : Progress report (Message 1992272) Posted 2 May 2019 by Jon Golding Post: Longer-term, is the plan to keep collecting SETI data and re-run Nebula at intervals? Or once this Nebula run is done, is that the end of the project?

19) Message boards : Science (non-SETI) : Dark matter/Dark Energy (Message 1978280) Posted 2 Feb 2019 by Jon Golding Post: Chris. Brian Cox gave essentially the same explanation in the YouTube programme mentioned on another thread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wieRZoJSVtw He pointed out that, from our perspective, the universe appears to be perfectly 'flat'. Of all the possible geometries, this seems extremely unlikely. Therefore, some theories suggest that the universe is actually curved, but what we see as the visible universe is but a small part of the main universe. He put it in the context that, standing on Earth and being able to view only around a square mile, you might get the impression that the surface of the Earth is flat. Only if you're able to see a much larger area do you begin to appreciate that the Earth is actually curved.

20) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Oumuamua (Message 1977870) Posted 30 Jan 2019 by Jon Golding Post: There's a large ring of dust around the star Vega that was formed fairly "recently", probably by collisions of a large comet or asteroid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega So, perhaps it came from this nearby star (~25 Lyr away)

Next 20

 
©2024 University of California
 
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.