Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Members Corner:
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
If you can't attend in person
-ZOOM LINK -
https://sfcollege.zoom.us/j/96665218735?pwd=NVNyaTdkMEo5ejdHVFZpeERXZ3Zadz09
Speaker:
Dr. Alyssa Bulatek - University of Florida
Topic: SETI at Home
Alyssa Bulatek (she/her) recently received her PhD from the Department of Astronomy at UF, working with Dr. Adam Ginsburg. She studies the process of star formation in the Milky Way’s Galactic Center, using radio telescopes to measure light emitted by molecules (both simple and complex) that uniquely trace age milestones in the infancy of a forming star. Alyssa will join the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Haverford College as a Visiting Assistant Professor this fall. In her spare time, she enjoys reading (sci-fi/fantasy), playing video games (Ace Attorney), and cross-stitching (pixelated versions of impressionist paintings).
Title: SETI@home at 20: If it's Just Us, Seems Like an Awful Waste of Space
Abstract: From 2006 to 2020, a receiver on the Arecibo radio telescope passively recorded data at 1.42 GHz. These data, taken as other receivers on the telescope observed astronomical targets, were loaded onto magnetic tapes (later disk drives) and shipped to UC Berkeley. There, they were divided into small packages, uploaded to the Internet, and distributed to hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe to be analyzed while those computers idled. This is the front end of SETI@home, an ambitious 14-year search for technosignatures: astrophysical signals created via technological (i.e., non-natural) processes indicative of extraterrestrial intelligence. In this talk, I will discuss one of the papers summarizing the data analysis processes involved in the SETI@home back end. The paper discusses a robust pipeline for identifying, vetting, and characterizing signal candidates, as well as how the researchers looking for signals in SETI@home data knew what to look for in the first place. I will break down the SETI@home data acquisition and analysis strategies and talk about future plans for re-observing sky locations with potentially interesting signals using the FAST radio telescope. Though SETI@home has not yet detected any definitive signs of extraterrestrial life, the advancements in distributed computing and algorithm design made throughout the lifetime of the project mark it as a significant achievement for the global astronomy community. After the talk, I welcome stories of your experiences with SETI@home!
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Member's Corner Speaker: Scott Dobson
Topic: My Journey in Astronomy
