SETI goes Kepler

Courtesy of NASA/Ames Research Center

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is one of the outstanding questions on the minds of many.   Needless, to say, this stems from a need to know if we are alone in the Universe.  SETI is focusing its search on the recent data release from the Kepler Space Telescope.   SETI has selected 86 planets from the the 1235 released by Kepler.   Why only 86?  Well, the main reason for this is that they want planets that can sustain water in liquid form.  Many of the planets detected by Kepler, so far, are giant gaseous roasters.

The search will be performed with the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia.   This facility can  record over 60 terabytes of data per day of observations in the range between the 21 cm hydrogen line and the 18 cm hydroxyl line.  Why between these 2 lines?  Well, to begin with this region on the radio is rather quite in the Universe and it is not absorbed by anything that we know of.  And second, SETI scientists believe that an intelligent civilization that depends on water will broadcast signals in this region dubbed, the "water hole" region.

The question remains, will we find intelligent life via radio waves?   Well, the answer is really out there, according with extrapolations from the Kepler observations, we could easily find about 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.  That is a huge number of planets.  Perhaps ET is in one of them!