 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.
It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
or microbes.
You assume that Eden was on Earth? ;)
A civilization does not have to fail in order for us not to detect any radio transmissions from it. We have been sending radio waves into the either for little more than 100 years, and I suspect that it will be less than 100 years more before we find a much better way to communicate.
“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.”
Best comment of the day.
My larger point is that there may be a short window of time where a civilization (as we understand it) may be detectable. They may go from the pre-industrial primitive to the G-d like in less than a thousand years.
Or, they could fail in a shorter amount of time.
I loved the Reaper stuff. Perhaps you are a Reaper FReeper.
If you want the full story check out, what in my opionon, is a high point in Video Gaming:
Yes you are one of the few that have stated what I have believed for a long time. We are already moving from high power radio to more distributed lower power radio. This will continue. What is scary though is that creatures far away may continue to monitor high power radio for periods long after they use it. They might receive our transmissions from say the early 1900s and dispatch craft that arrive in 2025 or something. They arrive and wipe us out.
thanks. I am not a gamer so I had no idea how sci-fi and gaming has merged. cool
Yes the Original Mass Effect is (in my opinion) a masterpiece of Sci-fi Immersion.
Maybe it's just the music but those two scene I posted, the one with Sovereign, the other with Vigil, are Milestones.
Absolutely incredible.
Number 2 was good, VERY good, different yet familiar, the way a sequel should be.
Sadly Mass Effect 3 is...........less than acceptable. That is when Electronic Arts got their money grubbing corporate hands on the franchise and cause many of the developers to leave and butchered the project.
But Mass Effect was the first Real Immersive Movie-Game and you got to choose how it all played out.
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