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A star-filled expanse over the Arecibo Observatory, located in Puerto Rico.(Image credit: University of Central Florida)ShareShare by:
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One of the biggest investigations into potential extraterrestrial life in history is approaching its conclusion, thanks to assistance from more than 2 million ordinary citizens and the celebrated Arecibo Observatory.
Started in 1999, the SETI@Home initiative recruited millions of global volunteers to aid in spotting unusual radio emissions within data originating from the Arecibo Observatory — a gigantic radio telescope situated in Puerto Rico that fell in 2020 because of a cable issue. Despite the project concluding earlier than planned with the telescope’s destruction, citizen scientists still pinpointed over 12 billion signals of interest within 21 years’ worth of data.
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As of now, there’s no undeniable proof of alien signals originating from any of these radio sources. Nevertheless, the team feels confident that their extensive data collection will contribute to even more fruitful quests for extraterrestrial life in the future.
“Even if we fail to locate ET, what we can affirm is that we’ve defined a novel threshold for detection. Should there have existed a signal surpassing a specific intensity, we would’ve identified it,” stated David Anderson, the project’s co-founder and a computer scientist. “We’ve assembled an extensive inventory of aspects we would have approached uniquely, and that prospective sky survey ventures should consider differently.”
ET enters the group chat
The pursuit of intelligent life beyond Earth (SETI) constitutes an area of scientific inquiry centered on identifying and interacting with sophisticated extraterrestrial societies by means of radio transmissions — premised on the notion that, given humanity’s technological advancements, comparable alien lifeforms might have attained similar progress.
The Arecibo telescope held a pivotal role in the SETI domain; back in 1974, a team of researchers featuring Carl Sagan and Frank Drake dispatched a radio broadcast from Arecibo directed toward a neighboring star aggregation, with the aspiration of connecting with an intelligent audience. The renowned “Arecibo Message,” conveyed in binary code, encompassed a human silhouette, a double-helix depiction of DNA, an illustration of a carbon atom, and a schematic representation of a telescope. (Regrettably, E.T. hasn’t yet reached out in response.)
A noteworthy hurdle for SETI stems from the abundance of radio frequencies pervading space; diverse entities, ranging from frigid hydrogen molecules to exploding stars, emit various forms of electromagnetic radiation. Distinguishing a substantive trace of radio signals from intelligent aliens amidst this cosmic jumble nearly reaches the realm of impossibility.
To aid in narrowing the search parameters, the co-creators of SETI@Home adopted a collaborative approach. The group prompted participants to obtain a complimentary software application for their personal computers, capitalizing on each computer’s processing capabilities to dissect Arecibo’s latest sweeps of the celestial sphere.
Initiating in the mid-1990s, the group formulated their project with a target of 50,000 volunteers. However, within the initial year of the project’s commencement, upwards of 2 million individuals spanning 100 nations were executing SETI@Home on their respective machines.
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“It went far, far, far beyond our original hopes,” Anderson conveyed. “I’m keen to communicate to that community and the broader world that we effectively carried out legitimate scientific research.”
Damage inflicted upon the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory, subsequent to its collapse occurring on Dec. 1, 2020. Expanding the search
In a pair of articles appearing in 2025 within The Astronomical Journal, Anderson alongside his associates elaborate on the extensive dataset amassed by their contributors, and how the group scrutinized it to identify the leading prospective signals.
The initiative concentrated on radio emissions emerging from the Milky Way galaxy in proximity to the radio wavelength of 21 centimeters, which corresponds to the wavelength employed for mapping hydrogen gas concentrations within the galaxy. As indicated by the researchers, astronomers consistently observe the cosmos at this particular frequency; a hypothetical alien civilization would understand this and leverage that frequency to amplify their likelihood of detection.
Leveraging a supercomputer supplied by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, the team eliminated countless spurious signals and terrestrial sources of radio interference, thereby reducing the candidate selection to a million. The group then examined the most encouraging 1,000 radio origins manually, narrowing them down to the top 100 competitors.
Until now, nothing out of the ordinary has surfaced from the outcomes.
“Without reservation, we stand as the most acute narrow-band survey encompassing expansive portions of the sky, affording us the greatest opportunity to discover anything,” stated Eric Korpela, an astronomer and director of the SETI@Home project, in the statement. “So, naturally, there exists a tinge of disappointment that we didn’t observe anything.”
Nonetheless, computational capacities available today greatly surpass those available in 1999, when the project was launched, Korpela incorporated. Analogous explorations are presently underway through FAST and other radio telescopes positioned globally; the investigation into alien intelligence will persist, and the data analysis will solely progress in velocity and dependability going forward.
“The possibility remains that ET dwells within that data, and our detection narrowly missed it,” Korpela inferred.
Brandon SpecktorSocial Links NavigationEditor
Brandon serves as the space/physics editor at Live Science. Drawing upon more than 20 years of editorial involvement, his work has been showcased in The Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website, and various other outlets. He possesses a bachelor’s degree in creative composition from the University of Arizona, complemented by minors in journalism and media arts. His fascinations encompass black holes, asteroids and comets, in addition to the pursuit of life beyond Earth.
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