SETI@home

What have we found?

Last updated: Tue Sep 18 04:05:35 2001 UTC

As of yet, SETI@home has not detected any radio signals that indicate the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Thorough scientific analysis of the results returned by the SETI@home screensaver programs is continuing. So far, SETI@home has received 365,869,056 results from all the SETI@home screensavers running around the world. This means that on the average SETI@home has received 111.62 results from each user.

Each result returned by the screensaver includes information about any significant spikes or gaussian signals detected in the analysis. (We use the term 'significant' to describe signals that are distinguishable from noise.) The average result returned contained 6.60 significant spikes, for a total of 2,647,483,147 significant spikes detected by SETI@home users. Click here to learn more about spikes.

The average result returned also contained 0.52 significant gaussian signals, for a total of 192,545,413 significant gaussians detected by SETI@home users. Click here to learn more about gaussians.

With the release of the client screensaver version 3.0, SETI@home now looks for pulsed signals as well as triplets. Thus far, there have been 144,787,001 significant pulses and 161,360,348 significant triplets detected.

Although SETI@home has not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, there are many signals that may prove to be extraterrestrial in origin once they have been carefully analyzed. The best 50 gaussian signals detected by SETI@home so far are available, ranked by their score. A map detailing the location in the sky of the best gaussian signals is also available.

The results of some initial analysis of the spikes and gaussians are detailed in the science newsletters. Analysis of an interesting trend in the spikes is described in Science Newsletter #3. The initial SETI@home gaussian analysis is detailed in Science Newsletter #4.

Also see our signal spike archive to view plots of spikes across frequency and time.



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