SETI@home Narrows ET Search to 100 Signals, FAST Telescope Re-examines | Quick Digest
After 21 years, UC Berkeley's SETI@home project has identified 100 promising radio signals from billions of detections. These signals, originally found by volunteer home computers, are now undergoing re-examination by China's FAST telescope in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI@home project ran for 21 years (1999-2020) with global volunteer participation.
Millions of home computers analyzed data from the Arecibo Observatory.
Scientists at UC Berkeley refined 12 billion detections to 100 candidate signals.
China's FAST telescope is currently re-observing these 100 signals since July 2025.
The analysis results were published in two Astronomical Journal papers in 2025.
Researchers expect most signals to be interference but value the project's scientific lessons.
The long-running SETI@home project, a pioneering distributed computing initiative launched by UC Berkeley in 1999, has concluded its data analysis, revealing 100 intriguing radio signals worthy of further investigation. For 21 years, until 2020, millions of volunteers worldwide contributed their home computers' idle processing power to analyze vast amounts of radio data from space. This colossal effort helped sift through observations collected by the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, yielding an initial 12 billion potential detections.
After a decade of rigorous scientific analysis, including filtering out radio frequency interference (RFI) using a supercomputer in Germany, the SETI@home team at UC Berkeley meticulously narrowed these detections down to one million candidate signals, and finally to a prioritized list of 100 that warrant a second look. These findings, which outline a critical roadmap for future searches, were detailed in two papers published in The Astronomical Journal in 2025.
Currently, astronomers are employing China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), one of the world's most powerful radio observatories, to re-observe these 100 candidate signals. This follow-up observation began in July 2025, seeking to determine if any of these signals repeat or exhibit characteristics inconsistent with terrestrial interference. While project co-founder David Anderson expresses tempered expectations, anticipating most will turn out to be RFI, the project is hailed as a monumental success in citizen science and a valuable learning experience for the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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