SETI & Technosignatures

The SERENDIP III 70 cm Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.IM
July 6, 2016
Filed under
The SERENDIP III 70 cm Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Arecibo
NSF et al

We employed the SERENDIP III system with the Arecibo radio telescope to search for possible artificial extraterrestrial signals. Over the four years of this search we covered 93% of the sky observable at Arecibo at least once and 44% of the sky five times or more with a sensitivity of ~3E-25 W/m2.

The data were sent to a 4 million channel spectrum analyzer. Information was obtained from over 1E+14 independent data points and the results were then analyzed via a suite of pattern detection algorithms to identify narrow band spectral power peaks that were not readily identifiable as the product of human activity. We separately selected data coincident with interesting nearby G dwarf stars that were encountered by chance in our sky survey for suggestions of excess power peaks.

The peak power distributions in both these data sets were consistent with random noise. We report upper limits on possible signals from the stars investigated and provide examples of the most interesting candidates identified in the sky survey. This paper was intended for publication in 2000 and is presented here without change from the version submitted to ApJS in 2000.

Stuart Bowyer, Michael Lampton, Eric Korpela, Jeff Cobb, Matt Lebofsky, Dan Werthimer (Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA)
(Submitted on 2 Jul 2016)

Comments: 9 pages. 5 figures. 2 tables. emulateapj 5/12/14 or later required
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1607.00440 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1607.00440v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Eric J. Korpela
[v1] Sat, 2 Jul 2016 00:32:39 GMT (237kb,D)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00440

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