New Telescopes Search for Giant Alien Structures in Space
“We are no longer talking about just detecting super-Earths,” says Malcolm Fridlund, COROT mission scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA). “We are talking about detecting Earths.”
The European Space Agency’s newly developed Corot telescope and NASA’s Kepler telescope are possibly going to change the method of quest for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), who previously has listened for alien radio broadcasts to find other civilizations. According to Luc Arnold of the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France, “Artificial structures may be the best way for an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to signal its presence to an emerging technology like ours.” According to Arnold, the next generation of space-based telescopes will have the ability to spot these alien structures, providing an alternative method for their search. His work is published in the “Astrophysical Journal” (http://www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0503580).
The new French space telescope, the Corot, was found to be ten times as sensitive as they originally had planned on. With the spacecraft sharp enough to detect small planets similar to Earth, it was a sheer surprise as this was originally considered as an impossible task, especially since the launching of the NASA Kepler was to occur in October of 2008. With the passing of an exoplanet in front of its parent star, a subtle dimming will occur which will be seen in the COROT’s sensitive detectors.
With a 60-day initial observation, the raw data shows two possible planets standing out. And when the team had created the software to enable the “final refinements of the new data”, the COROT was possibly going to perform 30 times better than what it was originally defined for. Headed by the French national space agency, CNES along with ESA and other partners, the telescope’s optics were supplied and tested on the ground before it was launched.
According to an article in the NewScientist.com, “Look out for giant triangles in space,” by Marcus Chown, both the COROT and the Kepler telescope will look for the telltale dimming of a star’s light when a planet passes in front of it—OR—they could also identify an artificial object the size of a planet.
The best place is around dwarf stars, in order to look for artificial structures of another civilization. This type of signaling is as effective as broadcasting a message with a high-powered laser pulse or a radio signal, which brings to mind the methods SETI uses. The reason the dwarf stars are the best bet for an advanced civilization to announce itself is because their small sizes can be dimmed by the “transit of a relatively small object.”
This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
