Giant Radio Telescope Could Detect E.T.'s Call

by Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | September 17, 2015 07:31am ET

http://www.space.com/30566-alien-civilization-signals-ska-radio-telescope.html?cmpid=NL_SP_weekly_2015-09-18


A huge telescope array will allow scientists to conduct the most sensitive and exhaustive search for signs of alien civilizations to date when it comes online, the project's backers say.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), currently planned to begin construction in 2018, could enable the search for intelligent alien life to piggy-back on other scientific observations, scouring the galaxy with unprecedented precision.

"A unique aspect for the search of life in the universe is the question of whether advanced lifeevolves intelligence," Andrew Siemion said at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago in June. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]



Siemion, who holds joint appointments with the University of California, Berkeley, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Radbound University in the Netherlands, hunts for signs of alien technology in the universe.

"The only way to answer that in the foreseeable future is to look directly for evidence" of intelligence, Siemion said. "For that, you need a large telescope."

The Square Kilometer Array is an enormous radio telescope that will be built in South Africa and Australia. Funded by a consortium of different countries, the SKA will combine thousands of small antennaeacross the globe instead of a single large dish, allowing unprecedented sensitivity in radio astronomy.

Using such a costly instrument for a single scientific study, especially one as speculative as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is unheard of in astronomy. But SETI scientists figured out a way to obtain significant telescope time nearly 30 years ago, when they began to piggy-back on other users' observations at the enormous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, duplicating their observations with very little loss of sensitivity. Today, SETI researchers are able to obtain thousands of hours of observations annually, which they diligently scrutinize for radio signals from beyond Earth.

According to Siemion, data from the SKA could be similarly piggy-backed. But while Arecibo utilizes a single large dish, the SKA will be much larger than the biggest radio telescope operating today, allowing scientists to search for fainter signals.

Construction on the SKA should begin in 2018. The first phase, planned for completion by 2020, would allow for about 10 percent of the collecting area of the full instrument at low and mid-range frequencies.

According to a paper Siemion authored last fall, a five-year campaign by the first phase of the SKA could allow scientists to survey more than 10,000 stars. When completed, the SKA could detect signals as faint as those emitted by aircraft radars on Earth from every star within almost 200 light-years.

Eavesdropping on E.T.

Earth began leaving its mark in the galaxy when humanity started transmitting signals by radio. These signals radiate outward from the planet, and could theoretically be detected by other civilizations. Given the enormous size of the spectrum that radio waves cover, scientists have suggested a number of preferred frequencies to hunt for extraterrestrial communication. [The Serious Search for Intelligent Life: 4 Key Questions (Video)]

As technology has improved on Earth, however, humanity has begun to reduce the radio-wave leakage into space. This could suggest that the window for observing accidentally broadcast signals is brief — perhaps only a century or so. While scientists still hope to detect such signals, they also aim to find deliberately transmitted radio waves, which have been designed to travel through space.

The SKA concentrates on a frequency region known as the "terrestrial microwave window," the spectral region of low natural noise between the galactic background and the emission and absorption of water and oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. These frequencies can travel through the space between stars and through the water-laden atmosphere of Earth or any other planet with ease, leading scientists to suspect that distant civilizations might use them to communicate.



SETI scientists aren't just searching for signals broadcast at random. They also hope to eavesdrop on interplanetary communications.

If alien technology spreads to multiple planets within a single system, it is feasible to expect these various outposts to communicate with one another. If those planets lie along Earth's line of sight, and observations are made when the planets are communicating with each other, it is possible that the SKA could pick up those broadcasts, researchers said.

In addition to the recent spate of planets unearthed by NASA's Keplermission, the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecrat and future missions such as NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite(TESS) could produce a catalog of properly aligned planetary systems to watch. Life-hunting researchers have already begun eavesdropping on some of Kepler's discoveries, for example.

"We're going to have all kinds of data to figure out how to build these databases in coming years," Siemion said.

Although the terrestrial microwave window will be the primary focus of the SETI search with the SKA, Siemion cautions that it is not the only potential signal for communication.

"We don't know exactly what E.T. is going to do," he said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.





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Sounds like SETI, part 2.

E.T go home

E.T was a good movie the book is way better though. It would be an interesting job.

imho, this should be under 'Science', but hey...

It's worth looking.

Chances are still pretty small. Human beings have only had radio for a mere century so far, and radio telescopes for rather less. The dinosaurs did 260,000,000 years without so much as a Walkman. How long we will last with working radios is another question.

Arguably, the dinosaurs are still here, in the form of birds. But birds don't build radios.

Evolution does not particularly favour intelligence. Those who have the best-adapted children, children adapted to have the most and best adapted children in the race for resources are those who succeed. Also arguably, the ants and the spiders are doing much better than humanity in terms of numbers of offspring, and they don't make radios or radio telescopes either.

When you start putting those terms into the Drake Equation, things start looking pretty grim. Then throw in the vast distances involved, the chance of them emitting radio at the same time (considering lightspeed) that we're listening, et cetera...

Still, it's worth looking. Even if you hear nothing, it's still worth showing 'as far as we can tell, there isn't any'.

S.

PS - A quote from Edward Snowden, of all people, pointed out that intelligent species, of which humanity is dubiously one, would probably encrypt their radio broadcasts, and good encryption is indistinguishable from random noise. Drake didn't have a term for that in his equation. S.

Not if he has e.t.& t.

E.T. call home

Newfound Earth-Like Planet, Kepler-186f, Is 'Best Case' For Hosting Life, Astronomers Say



AP | By ALICIA CHANG

Posted: 04/17/2014 3:06 pm EDT Updated: 06/17/2014 5:59 am EDT


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Astronomers have discovered what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet detected — a distant, rocky world that's similar in size to our own and exists in the Goldilocks zone where it's not too hot and not too cold for life.

The find, announced Thursday, excited planet hunters who have been scouring the Milky Way galaxy for years for potentially habitable places outside our solar system.

"This is the best case for a habitable planet yet found. The results are absolutely rock solid," University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, who had no role in the discovery, said in an email.


The planet was detected by NASA's orbiting Kepler telescope, which studies the heavens for subtle changes in brightness that indicate an orbiting planet is crossing in front of a star. From those changes, scientists can calculate a planet's size and make certain inferences about its makeup.

The newfound object, dubbed Kepler-186f, circles a red dwarf star 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. A light-year is almost 6 trillion miles.

The planet is about 10 percent larger than Earth and may very well have liquid water — a key ingredient for life — on its surface, scientists said. That is because it resides at the outer edge of the habitable temperature zone around its star — the sweet spot where lakes, rivers or oceans can exist without freezing solid or boiling away.

The find "is special because we already know that a planet of this size and in the habitable zone is capable of supporting life as we know it," lead researcher Elisa Quintana of NASA's Ames Research Center said at a news conference.

The discovery was detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science. It was based on observations that were made before the Kepler telescope was crippled by a mechanical failure last year.

The planet probably basks in an orange-red glow from its star and is most likely cooler than Earth, with an average temperature slightly above freezing, "similar to dawn or dusk on a spring day," Marcy said.

Quintana said she considers the planet to be more of an "Earth cousin" than a twin because it circles a star that is smaller and dimmer than our sun. While Earth revolves around the sun in 365 days, this planet completes an orbit of its star every 130 days.

Scientists cannot say for certain whether it has an atmosphere, but if it does, it probably contains a lot of carbon dioxide, outside experts said.

"Don't take off your breathing mask if you ever land there," said Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard and Max Planck Institute astronomer who had no connection to the research.

Despite the differences, "now we can point to a star and know that there really is a planet very similar to the Earth, at least in size and temperature," Harvard scientist David Charbonneau, who was not part of the team, said in an email.

If the planet is habitable, photosynthesis may be possible, said astronomer Victoria Meadows of the University of Washington, Seattle.

"There are Earth plants that would be quite happy with that," she said.

Since its launch in 2009, Kepler has confirmed 961 planets, but only a few dozen are in the habitable zone. Most are giant gas balls like Jupiter and Saturn, and not ideal places for life. Scientists in recent years have also found planets slightly larger than Earth in the Goldilocks zone called "super Earths," but it is unclear if they are rocky.

The latest discovery is the closest in size to Earth than any other known world in the habitable region.

Astronomers may never know for certain whether Kepler-186f can sustain life. The planet is too far away even for next-generation space telescopes like NASA's James Webb, set for launch in 2018, to study it in detail.

NASA has not yet decided whether to keep using the crippled Kepler telescope on a scaled-back basis. While the instrument may never detect another planet, scientists have a backlog of observations to wade through.

___

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/earth-like-planet-hosting-life_n_5168843.html

And this is why we do astronomy.

From a strictly capitalist perspective, there ain't no return on that in the next quarterly statements. Or even for the next five hundred years.

It's also a massive stab at the heart of economics, because economics has as a fundamental axiom that nothing happens without some expectation of return on investment. This is why pretty much all economic theories as taught today are bunkum, because their axioms are fundamentally flawed.

It's a bit like giving advice to farmers that starts with 'assume a perfectly spherical cow floating in a vacuum'. You may be able to derive all kinds of logically consistent results from that, but they're all nonsense because spherical cows floating in a vacuum bear no resemblance whatsoever to real cows.

However, if you can cook up an economic theory that those in power see as increasing their own wealth (see: trickle-down (aka voodoo) economics, and the Laffer (aka Laughter) curve) then those who have the power and the money will lavish (a little of) it upon you (See the Nobel Institute's putting up with this bank adding a prize for economics, most of which rewards only the bankers...)

Oop. Sorry, I just went off.

Anyhow. Astronomy. Good fun. Useful to do not for profit, but for exploration. Discovery. Learning new things that won't even get me kissed at a cocktail party; but I'm still happy to know them. That people out there care about just finding things out, and don't mind telling me about it.

I think that's keen.

S.

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http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/why_we_explore_main.html

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home

SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Its purpose is to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of SETI.

SETI@home was released to the public on May 17, 1999,[5][6][7] making it the second large-scale use of distributed computing over the Internet for research purposes, as Distributed.net was launched in 1997. Along with MilkyWay@home and Einstein@home, it is the third major computing project of this type that has the investigation of phenomena in interstellar space as its primary purpose.