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We now have a list of signal candidates that reports results from our latest candidacy analyses. The graph to the right (and on the Current progress summary page) reports the number of Gaussians passing our preliminary persistency checking process. (See below for an explanation of persistency checking.) In the past all persistent events have turned out to be RFI (originating from Earth), and it's likely these candidates will also turn out to be RFI once we investigate them further. Soon we will be checking persistency for spikes, pulses, and triplets. |
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 How to read a persistency graph |
SETI@home selects final candidates by inspecting detected events for
persistency in location across time. We define an event as "persistent" if it is detected in
the same frequency band and location in the sky more than once. Newsletter #9 describes a typical persistency analysis.
SETI@home carefully re-checks all persistent events for possible RFI sources. |
Once RFI is ruled out and a signal's persistency has been verified, the SETI@home team will request dedicated telescope time to re-observe the candidate. If the candidate looks promising, other groups will also be asked to take a look. They'll be using different telescopes, receivers, computers, etc., which should rule out any bugs in our equipment or computer code. Together with the other teams, SETI@home will make interferometry measurements (taking two observations separated by a long distance); these measurements can confirm that the source of the signal is at an interstellar distance (rather than a nearby signal emitted from Earth or a satellite, detected when the telescope happened to be focused on a particular area of the sky).
Once the signal(s) have been re-observed and confirmed, a public announcement will be made.
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