Looking For Life

The search for intelligent life in the Universe just became a lot more sophisticated.

There are thousands of scientists all over the world using radiotelescopes to search for intelligent signals from space, trying to prove once and for all that we are not alone. But the Universe is a Very Big Place, and even the largest radiotelescopes can only examine the tiniest, minute fraction of it. So scientists carefully and precisely point their telescopes directly at stars that they feel are most likely to have habitable planets orbiting them. But how do they know which stars these are, out of the hundreds of thousands in the immediate neighbourhood of our galaxy?

Along come Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull, two scientists that have devoted years to answering just that question. They developed a complex set of criteria for candidate stars, the most important being:

Out of all those stars, one of the closest, most likely candidates is a star called Beta CVn, shown in the above map. It is the second brightest star in the rather obscure constellation Canes Venatici, the hunting dogs. The dogs can be found just underneath the Big Dipper, nipping at the heels of the Great Bear, Ursa Major. Beta CVn is a star almost identical to our Sun, and is located a scant 26 light years away. But although 26 light years is relatively close in astronomical terms, it still translates into over 153 trillion miles, so we won't be visiting there, or even sending any robots there, for a very long time.

In the meantime, all we can do is listen. But just as the definitive catalog of habitable stars is published, the world's largest array of radiotelescopes - the Allen Telescope Array - is nearing completion. The array, located in northern California, will consist of no less than 350 interconnected antenna dishes, each dish 20 feet in diameter, which will collectively comprise a radiotelescope the size of eight football fields. And although the array will be able to conduct simultaneous astronomical duties, it was specifically designed to search for signs of intelligent life.

So the next time you see the Big Dipper poised in the northern sky, take special note of the small point of light just beneath it, a star just like our Sun, very far away. Look carefully at that point of light, and in your mind's eye zoom in on it, and there's a good chance you might see a planet orbiting that star, just like Earth. Zoom in a little closer on that planet, and you might see another life form, maybe just like you, staring right back...

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