UCLA SETI newsletter 2023-03-17

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March 17, 2023

Dear friends,

Welcome to the 40th edition of the UCLA SETI newsletter, and welcome to 150 new subscribers. If you are feeling nostalgic like me, or are just curious, consider reading our very first newsletter from December 20, 2015.

What a month it has been! We launched our citizen science collaboration – Are we alone in the universe? – on February 14, 2023 and we have been thrilled by the public and media responses. There have been more than 300,000 classifications submitted to date by over 10,000 volunteers (1/3 registered, 2/3 unregistered). Questions and comments about more than 3,000 signals have been posted by volunteers, and our science and communications team has diligently reviewed and answered these questions. I am so proud of the enthusiasm and dedication of our team members! We would not be able to operate the citizen science collaboration without them. I am grateful to The Planetary Society and NASA for entrusting us with seed funding and helping make the collaboration a reality. I am also immensely grateful for the generous gift from Robert Meadow and Carrie Menkel-Meadow, who, in their words, were inspired to contribute to the cause of "citizen science" and the sleuthing it encourages by amateurs, retired professionals, and others. Their gift will enable us to further spread SETI and citizen science love.

Our dedicated science and communications team

Our launch event webinar on February 16, 2023 was well attended and recorded. Participants submitted approximately 40 questions, and we addressed about half a dozen questions during the 30-minute Q&A period. We are addressing the remaining questions in "Question of the Week" posts on the UCLA SETI blog. So far, we have covered "Do advanced civilizations use radio?", "What would a technosignature look like?", and "Is humanity detectable by aliens?". We look forward to answering many more of the interesting and thought-provoking questions that we have received.

Last week, our collaborators got us excited by noticing a signal that is clearly artificial and designed to grab someone’s attention. Regrettably, our verification process indicated that the signal is the product of human technology. The search continues!

An intriguing signal identified by citizen scientists. In this spectrogram, time increases down, frequency increases to the right, and pixel intensity encodes signal power. This narrowband signal turn on abruptly, stays on for 18 seconds, and turns off.

Warm regards,

Jean-Luc Margot