COMPUTER owners are being urged to help scientists who are trying to get in touch with ET.
Astronomers involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project (Seti) are being flooded with data from the world's largest radio telescope.
Buried somewhere within it might be the alien signal scientists have been looking for since
1960.
However, not even the world's most advanced computers are fast enough to sift through so much information. So scientists are calling on the owners of desktop computers to add their combined number-crunching power to the task.
More than five million volunteers have already signed up to the Seti@home project, launched eight years ago.
Seti@home, based at the University of California at Berkeley's space sciences laboratory, now boasts 170,000 users and 320,000 computers, making it the largest internet project of its kind in the world.
But that is not enough to cope with processing all the data pouring out of the upgraded Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico.
New and more sensitive receivers fitted to the giant telescope are generating 500 times more Seti data than before.
The information amounts to 300Gb a day, or 100,000Gb a year – about the same amount of data stored in the US Library of Congress.
Professor Dan Werthimer, the project's chief scientist, said: "The good news is, we're entering an era when we will be able to scan billions of channels. Arecibo is now optimised for this kind of search, so if there are signals out there, we or our volunteers will find them."
The full article contains 267 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
