Sofia Sheikh
November 12, 2020
Zoom Recording
Sofia Sheikh presented an update on the data analysis from the 2018 PSU SETI course project. The group used the Green Bank Telescope to search for radio signals from transitting planets, proposing transits as an exoplanetary Schelling Point. They use turboSETI to search for signals in the data in a wide range of drift rates, getting ~400,000 event hits. To sort through this very large data set and get rid of the radio-frequency interference events, they use both people power and machine power. The PSU undergraduate Pulsar Search Collaboratory makes up the community-based science component, and they are sorting through the events for potential candidates by eye. Sofia et al. are also developing a machine learning method to sort the events with unsupervised clustering.