Narrowing the Search: SETILive is a part of the much larger, much broader and rapidly advancing field of exoplanetary research. The “S” in SETI stands for “search” and these advances will directly benefit SETI by narrowing the search. The current explosion in exoplanet discoveries ignited by the Kepler project is providing great fundamental data for planetary and astrobiology scientists to begin figuring out exactly how planets form and develop and what the prospects for life on these planets could be. The more they learn, the narrower the search for ET can be.

The SETI Institute’s concentration on these Kepler planets, with SETILive as a part of it, is an early example of this more informed search, focusing for the first time on a large number of planets that have good evidence that they could be in the water-based habitable zone. The new wave of discoveries that will help narrow down this search even more is the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres – finding out what gases are present.  Some of these gases, if found, could be a strong indication that a planet hosts life at some level, and quite possibly intelligent  life.

New Techniques: A sign of the progress being made in the study of exoplanet atmospheres is this work done through the European Southern Observatory also reported on spacedaily.com. Here, they are directly measuring the very weak “rainbow” of colors from the planet’s faint infrared glow produced by its own heat. This new technique is different than the method of seeing how the planet’s atmosphere affects the rainbow spectrum of the starlight behind it during a transit. It is based on that fact that, like a star, a planet’s own rainbow spectrum is affected by gases that surround it. The difference is that the planet’s rainbow light is very much weaker than a star’s and it’s concentrated in infrared wavelengths that are far out of the range visible to our eyes.

On the Horizon: So far, exoplanet atmospheric measurements are only feasible for large planets like this Jupiter-class one in a nearby star system. Measurements for smaller (earth-class), and more distant planets will come along in the coming decades as new instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope and the new giant ground-based telescopes come into play.

I feel that we’re at the beginning of a very exciting few decades in the search for extraterrestrial life in general and SETI in particular.

SETIcon II Event: This weekend the SETI Institute presents SETIcon II, in Santa Clara, California, US. It’s billed as ” a unique, entertaining and enlightening public event where science and imagination meet” on the event website. It looks to me like it will fill that bill and I wish I could have attended. If I lived anywhere near the Bay Area… road-trip, most definitely. It will feature SETILive in one of the many interesting exhibits. Other than it being of general interest to “SETIzen scientists” here at SETILive, it also means our “Telescope Active” time is going a bit off the normal routine for about a week, but there’s a good reason…

Lots of Prime Weekend Telescope Time: We normally observe the Kepler star field, looking for signals from specific stars determined by the Kepler project to have planets likely in the liquid water-based habitable zone. That star field is currently only above the horizon and visible from the ATA from late evening to mid-morning US time, and the other time is filled by other observing projects looking at different parts of the sky. By lending some SETILive active time from late evening and morning sessions during weekdays this week and next  to other ATA projects, the SETI Institute can give it back to SETILive this weekend for a pretty full daytime schedule in the Americas and from late afternoon to early morning east of the Atlantic. They’re filling the US daytime schedule this weekend by feeding us data from other exoplanet candidates outside the Kepler field when it’s below the horizon. So,  SETIcon II attendees will be able to see it work and work with it themselves using live data and of course, you can get on and classify  live data this weekend at times you aren’t normally be able to.

You can see the upcoming schedule along with the current status, as always, at  setiquest.info.

BTW: Telescope Active Window Slowly Shifts: By the way, and speaking of active telescope windows, six months from now the Kepler viewing window, and therefore our “Telescope Active” times, will have shifted by 12 hours and will be pretty much all during daytime hours in US . The apparent motions of Kepler field stars in the sky, like all extra-solar objects are due to  the true rotation period of the Earth, the sidereal day which is about 4 minutes shorter than our solar day. In six months, this small shift accumulates to half of a day, or 12 hours.

It’s been about five weeks since my last post where I announced we’d start testing follow-ups in the background and also that some improvements to the waterfalls along with adding simulated ET signals to them were imminent. Well, we checked  those subtle but important waterfall improvements off the t0-do list two weeks later and yesterday, at about 21:30 UTC, we finally got simulations live. It took five weeks – longer than we had figured, but like  most science and engineering tasks, you’re doing something new and don’t always know what you’re getting into until you start making it work. Now, Star Trek’s Chief Engineer Lt. Commander  Scott (“Scotty”) might have figured that it should take a week, multiply that by five to get the real time for the task and then multiply it again by five and tell the captain it would take 25 weeks. The Captain would demand it in five and Scotty would say “I’ll do my best, Captain”, self-satisfied and with a barely visible smile. I’ll try to be more Scotty-like in the future.

Trekkies: I know that the Star Trek franchise has alluded to and made references to this process over the years. Any specifics about those references would be appreciated.

Our primary purpose for inserting simulations (“sims”) into the waterfalls is to conduct a controlled experiment which will measure the statistics on how well you, as a group, are able to detect a signal in a waterfall with noise and sometimes RFI signals in the background. The results we get will be an important part of a peer-reviewed scientific paper we plan to eventually publish and we’ll make comparisons to some basic computer algorithms. So, you’ll be a part of these real, important scientific results derived from the SETILive project.

Another benefit of adding sims that users have pointed out is that it’s an occasional “test” that helps us be sure we continue to be careful, looking closely for that weak signal track  that’s fading in and out and seems to sort of follow a line. It could be a signal of interest, trigger a follow-up and who knows, even make it to “Wow!” status.

The sims have random positions, angles, “wandering” patterns and randomly fade in an out in brightness to emulate typical signals. The two  key parameters that are systematically varied over wide ranges are brightness and how much they randomly move from side to side (“erratic-ness”) . Because we’re trying to find the limits of our users’ ability to pick these out, some will be so dim that no one would be able to see them, so don’t feel badly when we show you where a simulation was that you missed. Currently, you can’t see just how dim a missed simulation was and we’ll look into whether or not we should change that. We have to carefully consider doing anything that might affect how you as a group do the classifying. It might add an unwanted variable into the statistics. There have been some good suggestions on Talk for how to do it if we can – thanks!

Speaking of follow-ups, that’s been an even tougher slog. We’re doing something that hasn’t really been tried before. Yes, SETILive follow-ups are modeled after the automatic ones that are already working at the ATA, but replacing detection algorithms and calls to local computer programs at the ATA with the remote,web-based, human-in-the-loop SETILive detection process is quite different in many details so requires some programming and communication protocols that are not already there. We also can only work at certain times in the ATA schedule and also have to deal with scheduling around the availability of the experts who are making it work. It’s coming along, and we feel it will be working soon. When will it be live? I’m afraid we can’t really say exactly. Where’s Scotty when you need him? He’d have an answer.