The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is picking up steam. The folks over at the Berkeley SETI group now have 7 separate searches underway at infrared, visible and radio wavelengths.
Today, Andrew Siemiona and pals outline the two newest programs which have recently seen first light and are hunting for pulses just a few hundred nanosceonds long. By contrast, most searches up till now have looked only for pulses a few seconds long.
The first, a project called Fly’s Eye at the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, can watch huge areas of the sky up to 100 degrees square and spot pulses as short as 0.625 ms
The second is called Astropulse at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and will be 30 times more sensitive than any search gone before.
The early results from these searches are being processed on the SETI@Home network which the authors claim is the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet.
Nevertheless, it looks as if they have long hard slog ahead of them: ET hasn’t revealed herself just yet.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0811.3046: New SETI Sky Surveys for Radio Pulses