US astronomers launch search for alien life on 86 planets

US astronomers launch search for alien life on 86 planets

The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one.

"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 University of California at Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

The mission is part of the SETI project, which stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, launched in the mid 1980s.

Last month the SETI Institute announced it was shuttering a major part of its efforts -- a 50 million dollar project with 42 telescope dishes known as the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) -- due to a five million dollar budget shortfall.

ATA began in 2007 and was operated in partnership by the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Lab, which has hosted several generations of such experiments. It was funded by the SETI Institute and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

With ATA's dishes in hibernation for now, astronomers hope the powerful Green Bank Telescope, a previous incarnation of which was felled in a windstorm in 1988, will provide targeted information about potential life-supporting planets.

"Our search employs the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and the most sensitive radio telescope in the world capable of undertaking a SETI search of this kind," Siemion told AFP.

"We will be looking at a much wider range of frequencies and signal types than has ever been possible before," he added, describing the instrumentation as "at the very cutting edge of radio astronomy technology."

Click link for more information

reply to post by Xcathdra


There is a thread on this already and you didnt even give your own opinion. You should know better.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Xcathdra


There's already a link about this on the main page.

Use the Search Feature ... It's Free!

As irritated as I was about SETI having to temporarily shut down, this brought me some relief. 86 planets are going to be checked for signs of civilization thansk to Kepler I am starting to think Kepler may be just what the doctor ordered in terms of getting some higher funding for projects like these.

Thanks to Kepler we can focus resources onto probable candidate planets instead of looking for the needle in the hay stack. Well, it allows us to look at just part of the hay stack..

either or win win in my book.

Originally posted by mblahnikluver
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

There is a thread on this already and you didnt even give your own opinion. You should know better.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Check the time I posted, the time you posted, and then the time i posted my "opinion".

Goofball

Gotta give us some time to actually comment before calling people out on it.

Originally posted by faryjay
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

There's already a link about this on the main page.

Use the Search Feature ... It's Free!

and still doesnt work all that well...... I guess in that case we really are getting what we paid for.

Originally posted by mblahnikluver
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

There is a thread on this already and you didnt even give your own opinion. You should know better.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Hehe, Ironic right?

Jamie.

reply to post by Xcathdra


There are more ways to check the boards than search. It takes less than 5mins heck 3mins to look at the recent posts, main page and new topics firehose to see what has been posted. I know cause this is how I search when I make a thread and 98% of the time it's been done lol I don't like making a thread and then having it closed because someone else did it but they did do it first so therefore mine should be closed. Duplicate threads for some reason haunt me! lol

Why do people always blame search?


Also I am in chat and when a thread is made it shows in chat so I click ones I like or ones that are duplicates, also why not post your opinion in the main OP?

reply to post by mblahnikluver


I do the searches.. Some people post the same articles and use a different title depending on where theyh pulled it from (like in this case). The search we have now is an improvement over what we used to have, but it still needs work.

As far as posting my opinion in the first post, I did not think we were suppose to do that anymore. I thought they wanted the first post to contain all the info the thread is about, and then start with the opinion / debate / questions on the second post.

Either or, you jumped in as I was composing my opinion response to the article... Like I said.. gotta give some of us time..

Existing thread here:
www.abovetopsecret.com...



Please add further comments, queries or concerns to the ongoing discussion.



Thank you



-thread closed-



for future reference:
Search ATS