SERENDIP (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations) is a Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program originated by the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]
SERENDIP takes advantage of ongoing "mainstream" radio telescope observations as a "piggy-back" or "commensal" program. Rather than having its own observation program, SERENDIP analyzes deep space radio telescope data that it obtains while other astronomers are using the telescope.
The initial SERENDIP instrument was a 100-channel analog radio spectrometer covering 100 kHzofbandwidth. Subsequent instruments have been significantly more capable, with the number of channels doubling roughly every year. These instruments have been deployed at a large number of telescopes including the NRAO 90m telescope at Green Bank and the Arecibo 305m telescope.
SERENDIP observations have been conducted at frequencies between 400 MHz and 5 GHz, with most observations near the so-called Cosmic Water Hole (1.42 GHz (21 cm) neutral hydrogen and 1.66 GHz hydroxyl transitions).
SERENDIP V was installed at the Arecibo Observatory in June 2009. The digital back-end instrument was an FPGA-based 128 million-channel digital spectrometer covering 200 MHz of bandwidth. It took data commensally with the seven-beam Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA).[2]
The next generation of SERENDIP experiments, SERENDIP VI was deployed in 2014 at both Arecibo and the Green Bank Telescope.[3] SERENDIP VI will also look for fast radio bursts, in collaboration with scientists from University of Oxford and West Virginia University.[4]
The program has found around 400 suspicious signals, but there is not enough data to prove that they belong to extraterrestrial intelligence.[5] In September–October 2004 the media wrote about Radio source SHGb02+14a and its artificial origin, but scrutiny has not been able to confirm its connection with an extraterrestrial civilization.[6] Currently no confirmed extraterrestrial signals have been found.[7]
|
| |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events and objects |
| ||||||
| Signals of interest |
| ||||||
| Life in the Universe |
| ||||||
| Planetary habitability |
| ||||||
| Space missions |
| ||||||
| Interstellar communication |
| ||||||
| Types of alleged extraterrestrial beings |
| ||||||
| Hypotheses |
| ||||||
| Fermi paradox solutions |
| ||||||
| Related topics |
| ||||||
