Marcy Searches For Alien Life
Astronomer and world-famous planet hunter Geoff Marcy is not just searching for extrasolar planets these days. Now he’s looking for signs of alien civilizations. The Washington Post and other media announced today that Marcy received a $200,000 grant from the Templeton Foundation to pursue a project aimed at finding out “Are we alone?”
Marcy is combing through the data accumulated by the Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler was launched in 2009, and it detects planets by observing the dimming of stars as planets cross in front of them. (See earlier post about Kepler’s malfunction.) Marcy wonders whether some of the dimming might be due to lasers or something else (perhaps an alien space ship?).
As Marcy told Peter Brannen of the Washington Post, “I do know that if I saw a star that winked out, then at some point it winked back on again, then winked out for a long, long time and then blinked on again, that that would be so weird,” he says. “Obviously that wouldn’t constitute the detection of an advanced civilization yet, but it would at least alert us that follow-up observations are warranted.”
