Overview
- UC Berkeley’s SETI@home sifted archived Arecibo radio data with help from millions of volunteer computers from 1999 to 2020, yielding about 12 billion initial detections.
- Layered filtering, including supercomputer processing at the Max Planck Institute, reduced candidates to about a million and then to 100 signals of interest for re-observation.
- FAST follow-up observations began in July 2025, with about 15 minutes spent on each target, and the early passes have not produced verified repeat detections.
- Two 2025 Astronomical Journal papers detail the distributed signal-processing pipeline and strategies to reject terrestrial radio interference from sources such as satellites and household devices.
- Researchers emphasize that the work sets new sensitivity limits and highlights the need for dedicated telescope time and broader coverage, with final assessments of the FAST follow-ups still in progress.