Many new worlds to scan
On Monday, the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, bringing to 2,326 the total number of potential alien worlds the instrument has detected in its first 16 months of operation.
Researchers have confirmed only about 30 of these candidate planets to date, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.
The ATA will take special interest in Kepler's candidates in the habitable zone, Tarter said. But SETI researchers hope to scan every last one of the potential planets to minimize the chances that we're blinded by our assumptions about where life "should" be.
"What we think we know actually might be a barrier to [finding] what is actually out there," Tarter said. "We intend to systematically explore all of these candidates."
The search of the Kepler candidates will involve scanning 9 billion different channels in a broad window of microwave frequencies. It should take two to three years, at $1.2 million per year, to search for signals from every potential alien world from the study, Tarter said.
It's exciting to focus the ATA on likely alien solar systems rather than just point the dishes toward stars and hope for the best, she added.
"We now know where to look for planets," Tarter said. "We're going to take the public's quest for technosignatures to the next level."
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