Shortlist of stars most likely to harbour intelligent life
20 February 2006
by Richard
Conan-Davies
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An astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington has made a shortlist of stellar candidates for habitable worlds around other stars. Margaret Turnbull announced her shortlist of so-called "habstars" at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis. She selected a handful of stars from a list of 17,129 "habitable stellar systems" that she considers her best bets, based on a variety of screening criteria. One of the criteria is the age of the star. They have to be at least 3 billion years old, long enough for companion planets to form and complex life to develop. Variable stars that are prone to lots of flares and pyrotechnics tend to be too young to meet her criteria. Also, stars more than 1.5 times the mass of our Sun don't tend to live long enough to produce habitable zones. Turnbull's top candidate star for scanning a star for possible intelligent life is beta CVn, a sun-like star about 26 light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici Although the criteria are clearly Sun-centric, Turnbull explained that they make sense. "We are intentionally biased toward stars that are like the Sun," she said. Like the Sun, such stars tend toward the brighter range in luminosity and are more likely to live long enough for life-supporting planets to form. "These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star," Turnbull said. |
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Original press release from AAAS
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