Scientists may be closer to discover alien life beyond the Earth, and they say it may happen within two decades.
Two leading scientists related to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have recently told the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in Washington D.C. that there is huge chances of discovering alien life within 20 years.
Along with exoplanets, there is also a big possibility of finding alien world and oceans on exomoons.
A team of scientists studied the data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Hoping of detecting alien interplanetary radio signals, they spent 36 hours listening when the planets in targeted solar systems lined up, relative to Earth’s perspective.
“We think the right strategy in SETI is a variety of strategies. It’s really hard to predict what other civilizations might be doing,” said Dan Werthimer, director of SETI research at the University of California Berkeley.
NASA’s Kepler telescope has triggered the search for new aligned planets and alien world.
Kepler, launched in March 2009, is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. The discoveries of Kepler include more than 3,600 planet candidates, of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds.
Since the discovery of the first planet, two decades ago, outside our solar system, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process.
Kepler observed 1,50,000 stars and found a few thousand of those to have planet candidates. Kepler, named after the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, observed hundreds of stars that have multiple planet candidates out of which 715 new planets were verified.
The latest discovery by Kepler brings the confirmed count of planets outside our solar system to nearly 1,700.
