Artist’s concept of a star with mulitple planets. Courtesy of Lynnette Cook.
NASA's Kepler mission has identified 2,740 planets orbiting other stars, but do any of them harbor intelligent life?. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have now 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.
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