Jan. 8, 2008 -- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) just got a huge boost of power that's straining the data-crunching capacity of its volunteer network of 320,000 privately-owned home computers.
Upgrades of the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, on which SETI piggybacks its instruments, have vastly increased the signal sensitivity and expanded the frequencies being tapped for signals from alien civilizations. That has resulted in a fire hose of data 500 times what was being gathered before the upgrades, said SETI project scientist Eric Korpela.
"The instruments we used ten years ago are pretty well obsolete," Korpela told Discovery News.
SETI gathers data at Arecibo by operating in the background, while radio astronomers -- who are doing unrelated research -- make primary use of the telescope to study various aspects of the cosmos.
Arecibo is particularly well suited for this sort of search, said Korpela, because its radio eye takes in a lot of sky at once and can pick up very weak signals too.
"We want both sensitivity and we also want a wide field of view," Korpela said.
Other famous radio telescopes like the Very Large Array in New Mexico, featured in the fictional SETI-derived movie "Contact," are better at focusing on very small patches of sky, and so are less useful for a broad survey.
The seven new receivers at Arecibo allow the telescope to collect radio signals from seven regions of the sky at once, rather than just one. Not only are the receivers more sensitive than their predecessors, but they are able to cover 40 times the frequencies and detect polarized radio signals.
As a result, the new instruments at Arecibo collect a whopping 300 gigabytes of data each day, or 100 terabytes per year.
To dig through all that data for signals SETI researchers have also had to dramatically upgrade the software of SETI@home, the groundbreaking distributed computing system that uses the home computers of volunteers.
"We've improved quite a bit since the original SETI@home eight years ago," said Korpela. More homes with always-on broadband connections and more powerful desktop computers have helped simplify and beef up the distributed computing, he said, though more volunteer computers are still needed.
Regardless of how soon the upgraded SETI technology detects the first signs of galactic neighbors, however, astronomers are reaping other benefits from spin-offs of SETI technology. One example is research on how the Milky Way powers its star-making regions.
"(SETI technology) allows us to look at galaxies fuel themselves by gobbling up gas," said astronomer Mary Putnam of the University of Michigan. In particular, her work involves identifying large clouds of gas from the Milky Way's smaller companion galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, as they are being pulled away and dropping like tear drops into the Milky Way.
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