May 13, 2011
UC Berkeley SETI survey focuses on Kepler’s top Earth-like planets
Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.
The search began on Saturday, May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope – the largest steerable radio telescope in the world – dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers.
“It’s not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they’re very good places to look for ET,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.
The Green Bank telescope will stare for about five minutes at stars in the Kepler survey that have a candidate planet in the star’s habitable zone – that is, the planet has a surface temperature at which liquid water could be maintained.
“We’ve picked out the planets with nice temperatures – between zero and 100 degrees Celsius – because they are a lot more likely to harbor life,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, chief scientist for SETI@home and a veteran SETI researcher.
Werthimer leads a 30-year-old SETI project on the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo receiver in Puerto Rico, which feeds data to SETI@home for a detailed analysis that could only be done on the world’s largest distributed computer.
“With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals,” he said. “But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before.”
Werthimer also was involved with a SETI project that used the previous Green Bank telescope, which collapsed from structural failure in 1988.
“It’s really amazing that SETI is able to come back home to Green Bank where project Ozma, the first SETI observations, took place 51 years ago,” said Green Bank scientist Ronald Maddalena. “We now have a sensitivity that was undreamt of when Frank Drake ran his experiment in 1960.”
Werthimer also conducted a brief SETI project using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which hosted a broader search for intelligent signals from space run by the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif. The SETI Institute’s search ended last month when the ATA went into hibernation mode after the institute and UC Berkeley ran out of money to operate it.
read more @ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/05/13/uc-berkeley-seti-survey-focuses-on-kepler%e2%80%99s-top-earth-like-planets/
