2026-01-12カリフォルニア大学バークレー校（UCB）
A screenshot of the SETI@home user interface on a desktop computer in 2009. The software ran on millions of home computers worldwide, analyzing radio data from space in search of signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
＜関連情報＞
- https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/01/12/for-21-years-enthusiasts-used-their-home-computers-to-search-for-et-uc-berkeley-scientists-are-homing-in-on-100-signals-they-found/#site-top
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5a7
SETI@home: データ分析と調査結果 SETI@home: Data Analysis and Findings
David P. Anderson, Eric J. Korpela, Dan Werthimer, Jeff Cobb, and Bruce Allen
The Astronomical Journal Published: 2025 July 24
DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab
Abstract
SETI@home is a radio Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project that looks for technosignatures in data recorded at the Arecibo Observatory. The data were collected over a period of 14 yr and cover almost the entire sky visible to the telescope. The first stage of data analysis found billions of detections: brief excesses of continuous or pulsed narrowband power. The second stage removed detections that were likely radio frequency interference (RFI), then identified and ranked signal candidates: groups of detections, possibly spread over the 14 yr, that plausibly originate from a single cosmic source. We manually examined the top-ranking signal candidates and selected a few hundred. In the third and final stage, we are reobserving the corresponding sky locations and frequency ranges using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope radio telescope. This paper covers SETI@home’s second stage of data analysis. We describe the algorithms used to remove RFI and to identify and rank signal candidates. To guide the development of these algorithms, we used artificial candidate birdies that model persistent ET signals with a range of power, bandwidth, and planetary motion parameters. This approach also allowed us to estimate the sensitivity of our detection system to these signals.
SETI@home: データ収集とフロントエンド処理 SETI@home: Data Acquisition and Front-end Processing
E. J. Korpela, D. P. Anderson, J. Cobb, M. Lebofsky, W. Liu, and D. Werthimer
The Astronomical Journal Published: 2025 July 24
DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/ade5a7
Abstract
SETI@home is a radio Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, looking for technosignatures in data recorded at multiple observatories from 1998–2020. Most radio SETI projects analyze data using dedicated processing hardware. SETI@home uses a different approach: time-domain data is distributed over the internet to >105 volunteered home computers, which analyze it. The large amount of computing power this affords (∼1015 floating-point operations per second (FPOP s–1)) allows us to increase the sensitivity and generality of our search in three ways. We use coherent integration, a technique in which data is transformed so that the power of drifting signals is confined to a single discrete Fourier transform (DFT) bin. We perform this coherent search over 123,000 Doppler drift rates in the range (±100 Hz s−1). Second, we search for a variety of signal types, such as pulsed signals and arbitrary repeated waveforms. The analysis uses a range of DFT sizes, with frequency resolutions ranging from 0.075–1221 Hz. The front end of SETI@home produces a set of detections that exceed thresholds in power and goodness of fit. We accumulated ∼1.2 × 1010 such detections. The back end of SETI@home takes these detections, identifies and removes radio frequency interference, and looks for groups of detections that are consistent with extraterrestrial origin and that persist over long timescales. This paper describes the front end of SETI@home and provides parameters for the primary data source, the Arecibo Observatory; the back end and its results are described in a companion paper.
