[sachmo]

Good news, alien hunters!

The world's most popular ET-hunting program for home Users is about to get upgrades of both its software and the telescope that feeds data into it.

For three years, SETI@home has used the spare processing power of computers across the world, in the guise of a screensaver, to examine radio telescope data for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The data comes from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which can scan only a 30-degree patch of the sky in the Northern Hemisphere.

Starting early next year, the Arecibo recorder will be shut off and a new but similar recorder will be turned on at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, which can observe 70 degrees of the sky -- and a more advantageous part of the sky, too.



The odds go up for finding ET from the Southern Hemisphere. Why? Because most of our Milky Way Galaxy's stars, in the dense central bulge, are visible only from south of the equator. While northern skywatchers see our galaxy's main disk -- itself rich in stars -- the denser bulge barely rises above the horizon.

And the chances of getting a signal from outside of the Milky Way "is pretty small," says David Anderson, the SETI@home project director at the University of California at Berkeley.

New software

At around the same time as the Parkes Observatory recorder comes Online, SETI@home will also release new software designed to broaden its scientific applications and streamline the program.

The first change expected to come Online is AstroPulse, a program that will scan the three years of Arecibo data stored on tapes for broad band signals, or "a sudden burst of energy that's spread across a wide frequency range," Anderson explained in a recent interview with SPACE.com. The current SETI@home algorithms search for narrow-band signals.

One of the most exciting explanations for such an observation, Anderson says, is the evaporation of quantum black holes, a phenomenon predicted by Stephen Hawking but that has yet to be observed.

According to Hawking's theory, "black holes give off radiation and therefore lose mass," Anderson explains. "So small black holes will basically kind of dry up and go away. In the moment of their disappearance, the theory predicts that they will give up a short burst of broad band radio radiation. Our data from Arecibo is an ideal place to look for that sort of thing."

Going BOINCers

With the release of AstroPulse will come the inauguration of BOINC, or Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networking Computing.

BOINC, in essence, is "a new layer of software" that separates the different components of the SETI@home program. It will allow changes to be installed without interrupting the screensaver or asking the user to download upgrades.

About 4 million people have downloaded SETI@home, and roughly 600,000 use it on a regular basis. In the past, when new Versions of SETI@home were released and were finally installed by the Users, "it's taken between six months and a year," says Anderson. "BOINC will streamline that."

BOINC will also make it possible to seamlessly integrate different kinds of computing projects into SETI@home, such as programs that analyze biological functions, global warming, or anything else researchers can dream up.

"We're opening things up to the world," Anderson said. "It turns out there are many areas of science…that can also benefit from huge amounts of computer time."

A project called Folding@home, which simulates protein folding and its related diseases, already exists.

Democratizing science

Users will be able to integrate projects such as Folding@home into their desktop Versions of SETI@home by clicking a box, Anderson says. This will also allow Users to divide their processing power between projects. "They won't be forced to choose between one project and another … essentially bringing a form of democracy to science research," Anderson says.

SETI@home was founded in 1995 by David Getty, a former computer science graduate student of Anderson's at Berkeley. The original idea was always to tap into the unused power of computers everywhere for scientific data analysis. But, "to get SETI@home off the ground at all, we really had to limit our ambitions and just try to do things in as simple a way as possible," Anderson says.

With BOINC and the increasing interest of scientists everywhere in this computing power, SETI@home is expanding.

At its core, still, is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And switching to the Parkes Observatory will make work easier for the 5-member SETI@home staff. One of the main tasks of the staff (besides writing software such as BOINC) is to examine any possible extraterrestrial signals detected by the SETI@home program.

Most, if not all of the signals, are a result of television, radio and other signals leaking into the telescope from the one civilization we know to exist.

To solve this problem, SETI@home will take advantage of Parkes' multi-beam receiver. It is one of the first observatories in the world to install one. Instead of examining only one point in the sky at a time, as Arecibo does, Parkes will record data from several.

"If you get a signal that seems to be coming from several points in the sky at one time," Anderson explains, "then it's probably not coming from the sky at all. It's coming from Earth and bouncing off the atmosphere and back into the telescope."

Anderson expects SETI@home Users to begin analyzing Parkes data soon after AstroPulse is released in February or March of next year. But, he adds, "every scheduling prediction that I've made has been way off."