NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series

Dan Wertheimer

Space Science Lab Berkeley


Is Anybody Out There? Searching for ET and Transients with Eight Million SETI@home Volunteers


I'll review seven Berkeley SETI programs at IR, visible and radio wavelengths, concentrating on newer experiments, Astropulse and Fly's Eye at Arecibo and the Allen Telescope Array. The SETI@home sky survey analyzes multibeam Arecibo data using desktop computers from five million volunteers in 226 countries. SETI@home participants have formed Earth's second most powerful supercomputer, averaging 500 Teraflops/second. Users have the small but captivating possibility their computer will detect the first signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. We are also carrying out two searches for microsecond time scale dispersed radio pulses. These microsecond radio pulses could come from exploding primordial black holes, compact-object mergers, cosmic-string cusp sparks, or perhaps from extraterrestrial civilizations. The Allen Telescope Array's "Fly's Eye" experiment observes a 100 square degree field by pointing each antenna in a different direction; by contrast, the Astropulse sky survey at Arecibo is extremely sensitive but has 1/3,000 of the instantaneous sky coverage.






December 19, 2008
11:00 am

Array Operations Center Auditorium

All NRAO employees are invited to attend via video, available in Charlottesville Room 230, Green Bank Room 137 and Tucson N525.

Local Host: Walter Brisken