Radio Frequency Interference
From Unofficial BOINC Wiki
[edit] General
The SETI@Home Project is certainly one of the most exciting Internet based Distributed Computing projects ever. Using a simple screen saver program, you can participate in the grandest search of all - looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. Your SETI@Home screen saver takes data from the world's most sensitive radio telescope and does a very detailed analysis of the signals received.
Within this process we have a very sensitive radio telescope and a very sensitive data processing system. What this means in practical terms is that it is very easy for us to detect and attempt to analyze information that is not of extra-solar origin. What we just captured is a valid radio signal, it's just not the one we want to capture.
Many of our Participants have seen these signals and written or called us brimming with excitement about their dramatic discovery. Unfortunately it's a whole lot easier to detect the earthbound signals than it is the extraterrestrial ones.
There are several different classes of interference that we can receive. Two of them are important to us and they are:
Most likely, if there is an intelligent signal lurking around, it will be almost buried in the noise of your graph, probably invisible to the unaided eye, but glaringly obvious to the detailed analysis that your computer is doing. The billions of calculations you do will hopefully expose the message that we all dream is there. If you see some evidence of a signal on your screen it is very important that you NOT contact the media until the signal is verified and checked. False alarms severely damage the credibility of SETI@Home and all serious SETI programs. Be patient. If there is a real signal, we promise to inform you and keep you "in the loop" concerning the progress of the search.
If you see anything like this one, then you can get a little excited (and maybe a little frightened or disappointed, or both). You still can't get too excited though. Your discovery still has to go through a rigorous set of tests and verifications to prove that it's truly of extraterrestrial origin. If your signal passes all of the tests and re-tests, then we'll all get excited!
