 UC SETI physicists plan to monitor stars with two transiting planets in hopes of eavesdropping on interplanet communications. Because these signals would be narrowly beamed, they would be stronger and, thus, more easily detected from Earth.
Posted on 03/22/2013 6:37:25 AM PDT by null and void
 UC SETI physicists plan to monitor stars with two transiting planets in hopes of eavesdropping on interplanet communications. Because these signals would be narrowly beamed, they would be stronger and, thus, more easily detected from Earth.
NASA’s Kepler mission has identified 2,740 planets orbiting other stars, but do any of them harbor intelligent life?
Scientists at UC Berkeley now have used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars. While discovering no telltale signs of life, the researchers calculate that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have planetary civilizations advanced enough to transmit beacons we could detect.
“We didn’t find ET, but we were able to use this statistical sample to, for the first time, put rather explicit limits on the presence of intelligent civilizations transmitting in the radio band where we searched,” said Andrew Siemion, who recently received his Ph.D. in astronomy from UC Berkeley.
Even with such odds, there could be millions of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
“The Kepler mission taught us there are a trillion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy, more planets than there are stars,” said UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, who heads the world’s longest running SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project at the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. “Some day, Earthlings might contact civilizations billions of years ahead of us.”
Siemion, Werthimer and their colleagues published their findings online in a paper that has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.
The 86 stars were chosen last year based on a list of 1,235 planet candidates known at that time. The scientists chose stars with five or six planet candidates in orbit and those that hosted planets that are thought to have Earth-like conditions, including temperatures that allow liquid water. The telescope, funded by the National Science Foundation, spent 12 hours collecting five minutes of radio emissions from each star in a frequency range (1.1 – 1.9 GHz) that on Earth falls between the cellphone and TV bands. They then combed through the data looking for high-intensity signals with a narrow bandwidth (5 Hz) that are only produced artificially – presumably by intelligent life.
Most of the stars were more than 1,000 light years away, so only signals intentionally aimed in our direction would have been detected. The scientists say that, in the future, more sensitive radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array, should be able to detect much weaker radiation, perhaps even unintentional leakage radiation, from civilizations like our own.
The team plans more observations with the Green Bank Telescope, focusing on multi-planet systems in which two of the planets occasionally align relative to Earth, potentially allowing them to eavesdrop on communications between the planets.
“This work illustrates the power of leveraging our latest understanding of exoplanets in SETI searches,” Werthimer said. “We no longer have to guess about whether we are targeting Earth-like environments, we know it with certainty.”
Coauthors of the study are Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky, Jeff Cobb and Geoff W. Marcy of UC Berkeley; Andrew W. Howard of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa; Paul Demorest, Ron J. Maddalena and Glen Langston of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO); and Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA.
The research was funded by a NASA Exobiology grant and donations from the Friends of Berkeley SETI and the Friends of SETI@home. The Green Bank Telescope is operated by NRAO under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities.
That’s why there were no muslims in Star Trek...
Akshul rasho of inhabited planets is
(# planets in universe)/one
Or, based on the singular data point you cited, zero.
You certainly won't find any in Washington DC.
Who do you think the Klingons are modeled after?
That’s not going to happen until the Big Guy comes back, then “colonizing” will have no meaning.
Socialism is the political expression of the religion of Humanism which began with the lie “you will be like God, knowing good and evil”,
and will only end when its author is flung into the Pit.
Well yes. We are talking about "Intelligent" Civilizations.
You could also have civilizations that, once sufficiently intelligent, lose their physical form and self evolve to a “higher” level (e.g., pure energy). That is what Arthur C. Clarke prophesied in some of his books, like “Childhood's End” and “2001 - A Space Odyssey”.
We’re closer to Idiocracy than any of those scenarios.
2700 id’d... Untold quintillions to go...
All the cool advanced civilizations use communicate via quantum entanglement. The coolest ones have the new iTangle - now with more cattle mutilation apps.
They were able to evaluate one million civilizations spread throughout the universe?
Exactly where are these million civilizations located?
And how did they communicate with them?We know there is no intelligent life to be found at this location:
I’m sure glad humans picked this one. :-)
The "recipe" for earth, that magnitude of perfection in what it takes to create life as we know it, intelligent life, probably is in the teens if at all, not in the millions.
I’ve often thought that the Human civilization will come to an abrupt end once someone invents a device that can channel entertainment directly into the mind.
Such an invention would give people the illusion they are doing something sexy or heroic when, in fact, they would just be in some sort of trace or sensory deprivation tank.
For most men, their “lives” would turn into one big porn movie. For most women, it would be an endless shopping trip.
The conditions need not be that exact if you allow the life to be something that isn’t identical to human life.
As near as we can tell the only real requirement for “life as we know it” is liquid water.
Everything else is details.
I see Michelle decided to hang out with the stormtrooper.
Where can I sign up?
One of my favorite games of all time. Outstanding!
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