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Domain: seti-inst.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to seti-inst.edu.
Stories · 3
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Jill Tarter and the Allen Telescope Array
An anonymous reader writes "Today's interview with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute (and Carl Sagan's inspiration for the main character of his novel Contact), outlines the forthcoming search capabilities of the large Allen Telescope Array. Their thousand-fold expanded search must find promising places to point 350 radio dishes. Outside San Francisco, the array spans an equivalent 8 football fields. Their new catalog, called HabCat, identifies all potentially habitable hosts for complex life within 450 light-years from Earth. Of the billions of places to point in the sky, their A-list total: 17,129. Start at Vega." -
42 Worlds in 32 Days
Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! " -
Telescope Cluster For SETI
ContinuousPark writes: "MSNBC is reporting that radioAstronomers showed today the Rapid Prototype Array, which consists of seven 12-foot off-the-shelf satellite dishes, set up at the Russell Reservation near Lafayette, CA. This experiment, in which computer software will control the drive systems of the dishes and process all gathered information, is going to tell astronomers how to build much bigger radio telescope arrays such as the 1-hectare telescope and the Square Kilometer Array; the SKA would be 10 to 100 more sensitive than the Arecibo radiotelescope. Check out the SETI Institute press release and photos. "
