By 
February 15th, 2023
Image credit: UCLA SETI
A new crowdsource project is calling upon citizen scientists to search for life in the universe.
The University of California’s UCLA SETI effort will give members of the public an opportunity to help scientists find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence by classifying radio signals that may have been emitted up to tens of thousands of light-years away and collected by a radio telescope.
No special training or education is needed to participate. (No need for those earphones used in the movie Contact).
Image credit: Warner Brothers
According to a UCLA statement, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) scientists use a radio telescope that observes thousands of stars in the sky, yielding around 5 million signal detections per hour.
Image credit: UCLA SETI
Potential signs
To date, the group has observed 42,000 stars and detected over 64 million radio signals. Their automated data processing software discards about 99.5% of the signals as having been produced either deliberately or as side effects of human technologies.
However, the remaining 10,000 detections per hour “constitute potential signs of alien technology, and the new project is designed to identify the most promising signals among them,” the UCLA statement adds.
The project was designed by UCLA SETI using the Zooniverse platform, with funding from the Planetary Society and NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding Program.
For more information, and to sign up, go to:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ucla-seti-group/are-we-alone-in-the-universe
Image credit: UCLA SETI
Posted in Space News
