You may have noticed right now that SETI@Home is down. Everything when down this weekend. Although Jeff put in a valiant effort and a lot of hours trying to get everything back up, we’ve made the decision to allow this to be the start of an approximately month-long outage in order for our server migration to take place, as well as the (drum roll, please….) installation of our two new machines! That’s right, we’ve finally got the order out, and thanks to volunteer donations, we have sent off for two, brand new, much-needed servers. Hopefully the server-restructuring will go smoothly and the project will be back online within a month. Keep your eyes on the SETI@Home news updates for further information.

In the meantime, we are doing a lot of prep-work in anticipation of this enormous database migration, specifically by getting the databases as small as we possibly can.

In order to do this, we have to ask ourselves: What data is expendable? What data can we afford to loose?

Well, that data that is not RADAR-blanked is pretty much useless. How much of the data is not-blanked? (Matt says: ballpark guess would be around 20%-30%). This is good news, if we get rid of this we can get the database down to 70%-80% or so percent of its current size.

News about the development of the potentially new visual RFI-rejection system. We currently have a visualization tool that will show zone RFI…and we will be able soon to have something that we can look at and see obvious RFI that is not zoned. Basically, we want to employ automatic RFI rejection as we can.

Dave asked: Is it the right model continue to throw away RFI zones that we have been throwing away for the last 10 years??

Jeff responded: Eric did the statistics and it’s actually not a large part of our data that we throw away.

Dan responded: There are some zones marked that are very obviously RFI, and some that are more off-and-on.

The next step in this whole crowd-sourcing, RFI visual-rejection project will be just to get a few plots out there and see how they are received. The real question now is what is the most effective way to represent the plots in a way that is easy for people to understand. What we have right now makes sense to us…but one of the goals of this project is to make these plots make sense to the public (but that goal is somewhere down the road). Nevertheless, it is useful to start thinking about this, after all we can only start the public training processes into the GUI is finalized.

But now, Jeff suggested, it is a question of priorities: basically, we all have a lot on our plate now.

Dan’s Suggestion: throw out the version you have at the moment, and see if people here can understand it at first. After Matt gets some feedback, we can work towards making the GUI streamlined so that it is understandable for both Scientists and the public.

In Fun, Science News:

Swiss scientists are not able to confirm the presence of the planet GL581g (the planet in the habitable zone of the star Gliese), despite careful observations for many years. Because the European team doesn't detect the proposed planet in their data, it is a little more questionable as to whether or not the planet is actually there.

A survey published in the October 29th issue of Science by UC Berkeley’s very own Andrew Howard and Geoff Marcy states that there are approximately a zillion Earth-sized exoplanets out there. OK, so maybe not a zillion…but essentially. Based on the observations made in this study, Earth-sized planets must be very, very common.

Former SETI group scientist Paul Demorest, who currently works out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has discovered a pulsar that is larger than and other known pulsar. The paper was published in Nature the 28th of October, 2010. By making precise measurements using Shapiro Delay (when it takes light a little bit longer to travel in the curved time-space near around a very massive body), the team has estimated the size of the Pulsar to be about 1.9 times the mass of the sun. This new discovery is changing some perceptions of the equations of state for neutron stars—basically making the theorists squirm.

In Proposal news:

We submitted 2 to NASA last week, good work everyone!

In a bizarre twist to the end of proposal-writing season The National Science Foundation got hit by lightning—so their proposal deadline has been extended (Act of God??).

In general, it’s been a really busy couple of weeks for everyone, but it’s a good sign!