http://truthufo.blogspot.com/: The intelligent civilizations could find themselves in close 5 stars

Friday, 22 August 2008

The intelligent civilizations could find themselves in close 5 stars

Five nearby stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, are probably the best candidates for planets similar to Earth that could harbour intelligent civilizations, announced Saturday an American astronomer.

This selection was made according to a number of criteria, such as size, composition, age and color of these stars that make them similar to our sun, "said Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

She unveiled her head list of stars to which radio telescopes can turn a priority for their ears have the best chance to capture extra-terrestrial signals at the annual conference of the American Society for Promoting Science (AAAS ) Met this weekend in St Louis (Missouri, centre-north).

The astronomer has cited the star beta CVn about 26 light years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. A light-year equals 9,500 billion km.

These five stellar candidate most likely to harbour extra-terrestrial civilisations are part of a list of ten stars selected by Margaret Turnbull in the future project "Terrestrial Planet Finder / TPF" NASA, the U.S. space agency , Whose objective is to find and observe planets similar to Earth.

The TPF, which will consist of two space telescopes, was originally scheduled to be launched 2016, but the launch was postponed apparently due to reductions in the proposed NASA budget for 2007 which has just been submitted to Congress, "said Turnbull .

"There are more than 400 billion stars in our galaxy and it is obvious that the TPF (the discoverer of planet Earth) will not observe them all," she said at a press conference.

She had started her quest with his colleagues to select a dozen candidates most promising and sufficiently close, scrutinizing nearly 120,000 stars of the Milky Way located in the vicinity of our solar system.

In 2003, this team of astronomers had reduced this catalogue to 129 "habitable stellar systems", then to ten today.

In addition to the star beta CVn, is also included in the ten nominees, Pegasus 51, famous since 1995 when Swiss astronomers had detected the first planet outside our solar system, a giant similar to Jupiter.

There are also 16 Sco, a popular choice for hunters of exoplanets, which is located in the Scorpion constellation near the center of the Milky Way. This star is almost the twin of our sun, "said Margaret Turnbull.

The search for signals from intelligent source in the universe is led by the SETI, "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence", a scientific organization financed entirely today by private funds. The institute was founded in 1984 by the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan died in 1996.