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Behind the scenes at Berkeley SETI: Part II
In our latest video, Berkeley SETI Research Center Engineer Dave MacMahon takes us into the server room and shows us some of the equipment that powers the search: https://youtu.be/WcTcQIVrskw
Watch Part I of our interview with Dave at https://youtu.be/IOJ6-_gIyP0
6 Sep 2016, 20:59:42 UTC
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Weekly outage
Sorry about the misinformation on the weekly outage. When we're in outage mode the message uses the current day of the week as the day of the weekly outage. We will go back to Tuesday outage next week.
The delay in the outage this week was due to the media flap over the Russian announcement.
1 Sep 2016, 4:28:09 UTC
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Breakthrough Listen observations of HD 164595
The Breakthrough Listen team has posted their archival search for emission from HD 164595 and the initial analysis of their recent observations of that target.
30 Aug 2016, 19:37:24 UTC
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"Baffling" "signal" "from HD 164595" is probably none of the above.
I'm sure that many of you have seen the news reports of a "SETI signal" detected from the star HD 164595
I was one of the many people who received the the email with the subject "Candidate SETI SIGNAL DETECTED by Russians from star HD 164595 by virtue of RATAN-600 radio telescope." Since the email did come from known SETI researchers, I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.
Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view. All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint.
But, of course, it's been announced to the media. Reporters won't have the background to know it's not interesting. Because the media has it, and since this business runs on media, everyone will look at it. ATA is looking at it. I assume Breakthrough will look at it. Someone will look at it with Arecibo, and we'll be along for the ride. And I'll check the SETI@home database around that position. And we'll all find nothing. It's not our first time at this rodeo, so we know how it works.
29 Aug 2016, 17:50:30 UTC
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Berkeley SETI Research Center Highlights
We hope you enjoy this five minute highlight reel of some of our previous and upcoming videos. Hear about SETI@home and the Breakthrough Listen optical and radio searches, visit the Green Bank Telescope, see our computing hardware, and meet some of our undergraduate researchers: https://youtu.be/y0betLmOYhk
Follow Berkeley SETI on Twitter: http://twitter.com/setiathome
Facebook: http://facebook.com/BerkeleySETI
Instagram: http://instagram.com/setiathome
25 Aug 2016, 19:09:02 UTC
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