Artist's impression of an exoplanet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. Credit: NASA
By Ben Gilliland
10 January 2012
For decades, the search strategy for locating intelligent extra-terrestrial life has been to blindly scan the heavens in the hope of stumbling across alien radio signals. In the future, astronomers will target some of the 700 (and rising) exoplanets discovered by the likes of NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.
SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) scientists are now analysing radio telescope observations of Kepler planets for radio signals “not caused by natural phenomena”.