Transcript SETI.berkeley.edu

Current Approaches
to the Search for Life
Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley
http://seti.berkeley.edu
Berkeley SETI Group
David Anderson, Bob Bankay, Jeff Cobb, Charlie Fenton,
Andrew Howard, Terry Filiba, Josh Von Korff, Eric Korpela,
Matt Lebofsky, Arielle Little, Geoff Marcy,
Andrew Siemion, Mark Wagner, Shelley Wright,
Dan Werthimer
Frank Drake, Seti Institute
Rem Stone, UC Santa Cruz
Jim Cordes, Laura Spitler, Cornell
NSF , NASA, Individual Donors
Xilinx, Sun/Oracle, Fujitsu
Agilent, HP, Intel
UC Berkeley SETI Programs
Name
Time Scale
Search Type
SERENDIP
seconds
radio sky survey
SETI@home
mS - seconds
radio sky survey
Astropulse
nS – uS
radio sky survey
Fly’s Eye
mS
radio sky survey
SEVENDIP
nS
visible targetted
SPOCK
1000 seconds
visible targetted
DYSON
IR targetted
Lick and Keck Telescopes – Geoff
Marcy
Optical SETI Survey: 650 stars
Green Bank 300 foot telescope
SERENDIP IV
Photos Courtesy NAIC Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF
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168M channels
100 MHz Band centered on 1420 MHz
Commensal Sky Survey at Arecibo
Data storage: NERSC HPSS
(Naional Energy Research Scientific Computing Center)
The SETI@home Client
Volunteer Computing Projects
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Astronomy
– SETI@home
(Berkeley)
– Astropulse
(Berkeley)
– Einstein@home: gravitational pulsar search (Caltech,…)
– PlanetQuest
(SETI Institute)
– Stardust@home (Berkeley, Univ. Washinton,…)
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Earth science
– Climateprediction.net
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(Oxford)
Biology/Medicine
– Folding@home, Predictor@home
(Stanford, Scripts)
– FightAIDSathome: virtual drug discovery
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Physics
– LHC@home
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(Cern)
Other
– Web indexing/search
– Internet Resource mapping (UC Berkeley)
Rosetta Screensaver
Citizen Science Projects
Thinking@home
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Stardust@home
(UC Berkeley)
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SetiQuest
(Seti Institute)
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Galaxy Zoo
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Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count (1900)
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Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Monitor Network
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Clickworkers (mars crater identficiation - NASA)
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Ebird, NestWatch, FeederWatch, Urban Birds (Cornell Univ.)
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ParkScan (monitor San Francisco Parks)
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ScienceForCitizens.net
(Galaxy Classification)
Stardust (NASA)
Stardust January 2009
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CASPER
Collaboration for Radio Astronomy
Signal Processing and Electronics Research
Collaborators
Xilinx, Fujitsu, HP, Sun Microsystems, NSF, NASA, NRAO, NAIC,
CFA (Havard/Smithsonian), Haystack (MIT), Caltech, Cornell, CSIRO/ATNF,
JPL/DSN, South Africa KAT, Manchester/Jodrell Bank, GMRT (India),
Oxford, Bologna, Metsahovi Observatory/Helsinki University,
University of California, Berkeley; Swinburne University (Australia),
Seti Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara;
University of California, Los Angeles; CNRS (France), University of Maryland
Nancay Observatory, Univerity of Cape Town (South Africa),
ASTRON (Netherlands), Academica Sinica (Taiwan), Cambridge,
Brigham Young University, Rhodes University (South Africa)
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The Search for microsecond pulses
at Arecibo and the Allen Telescope Array
Geoff Bower, Griffin Foster, Eric Korpela, Peter McMahon,
Andrew Siemion, Joeri van Leeuwen, Josh Von Korff,
Mark Wagner, Dan Werthimer, and the ATA staff
Crab Giant Pulse Detection
Astropulse Volunteer Computing
uSec Dispersed Pulse Search
Did We Miss Something?
Dan Werthimer
University of California, Berkeley
http://seti.berkeley.edu
Likely YES – Examine history:
SETI ideas
morphing over
200 years
It’s naïve to think we know how
best to search today, given our
history of changing SETI fashion.
• Multiple strategy is best
(IR, Vis, Radio, pulse, continuous, targetted
sky survey…)
• Half of astronomy discoveries are serendipitous
• Examine glitches in data
• Data Mining Experiments (Virtual Observatory)
OPTICAL SETI Example of anthropomorphic SETI
1961 Charlie Townes Paper
largely ingored until 1999
1971 Cyclops report calculates radio >> optical
Today’s lasers can communicate across galaxy
Traditional SETI dogma:
ultra narrow band sine waves
barycentric, beacons, FGK stars
21 cm
Future dogma:
many bandwidths, frequencies,
drifting signals, pulses, IR, Visible, Radio
M stars, galaxies, data mining searches
leakage and beacon searches
Dyson Sphere, Lagrange Point Searches..
Pulsed Communication –
Wide-open Parameter Space
Geoff Bower, et al.
Moores Law – Instruments using FPGA’s: 2X per year
(1,000,000 over 20 years)
Future Spectrometers
2015
4 THz
2020
128 THz
400 beams
10 GHz each
12,800 beams
2025
4000 THz
40,000 beams
2030
128,000 THz 1M beams
Future Technologies
• RFI mitigation (no need to go to the moon)
• All sky - wide bandwidth telescopes
• Pulsed high QE Vis/IR detectors
(APD’s, SSPM’s…)
• New Algorithms (PCA/KLT/Hoteling)
• New Computing Technologies
FPGA’s, GPU’s, Quantum Computing?
Use Sun As Gravitational Lens
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Focus at 1000 AU
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Read License Plates on Extrasolar Planet
When will Earthlings find ET?
• Equal probability per logarithmic time interval
• 10% chance in 10 years, 10% in 100 years,
• 10% in 1000 years, 10% in 10,000 years,
• 10% in 100,000 years, 10% in 1M years,
• 10% in 10M years, 10% in 100M, 10% in 1E9
• 10% never
SETI HAIKU
Searching for life
Answers are revealed
About ourselves
Paula Cook, Duke University
One million earthlings
Bounded by optimism
Leave their PC’s on
Dan Seidner
To Learn More about SETI
or Participate in SETI@home
or Vote for Who Won
“the Great Debate –
Are We Alone?”
Dan Werthimer vs. Prof. Geoff Marcy
SETI.berkeley.edu
Future SETI – whats needed
• Public Interest
• Scientific Literacy
• Funding - Private, Industry, Government
• SETI experts (student SETI researchers)
• New Instruments
(telescopes, signal processing)
Gaussian Candidates
Web site: 2 million hits/day
200,000 visitors/day
(stats & games popular; science less popular)
100,000 children, families
(including congress members and their kids)
> 7,000 schools
Desired SKA Parameters
• Wide bandwidth
• 1 M beams
• fat beams
• short dwell times (~ 100 seconds)
Search for Optical/Radio Signals from Dyson Sphere Candidates|
Charlie Conroy
• Looked for IR excess from >500
stars
• All stars had age > 1 Gigayear
• 33 stars found with 12m excess
• Searched for anomalous radio
detection using SETI@home and
SERENDIP IV databases
• Searched for optical pulse
emission using OSETI experiment
• Thus far, none of the 33 sources
have shown anomalous optical or
radio emission
Color excess using 2MASS K band data and 12, 25, 60, & 100
micron IRAS data. An excess at K-[12] is clearly visible and
disappears by K-[25]. Dotted lines are Gaussian fits to the
distributions. The 33 IR excess candidates have K-[12] > 3 above
the mean.