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SETI@home Unveils 100 Vetted Radio Candidates From Arecibo Data for Targeted Follow-Up

The shortlist stems from decades of Arecibo data processed via volunteer computers after supercomputer screening.

Overview

  • UC Berkeley researchers publicly identified 100 signals of interest after winnowing roughly 12 billion detections gathered between 1999 and 2020.
  • Automated radio-frequency interference removal on a Max Planck Institute supercomputer cut the dataset to a few million, with manual review producing the final list.
  • Follow-up observations using China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope have been underway since July 2025 to re-examine the candidate sky regions.
  • The team reports no confirmed extraterrestrial signal to date and emphasizes new sensitivity benchmarks and methodological lessons for future SETI searches.
  • Two papers in The Astronomical Journal detail the pipeline—spanning Doppler-drift searches and human vetting—enabled by millions of citizen-science computers worldwide.