Search for ET to focus on five stars

FIVE nearby stars have been chosen as the best places to look for alien civilisations.

They will now be targeted by scientists involved in SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The stars were whittled down from a list of around 2,000. All are at least three billion years old - long enough to allow intelligent life to evolve. They are also without companion stars that might disrupt the orbits of habitable planets.

Like the Sun, they contain heavy metallic elements such as iron and nickel, which are essential for the creation of “rocky” Earth-like worlds.

US astronomer Dr Margaret Turnbull, who led the search, said: “We are intentionally biased toward stars that are like the Sun. These are places I’d want to live if God were to put our planet around another star.”

A powerful new array of radio telescopes will be used to listen out for intelligent signals from the planets.

Dr Turnbull named her most promising candidate as Beta CVO, about 26 light years away in the ‘Hound Dogs’ constellation of Canes Venatici. The star is visible to the naked eye in the northern hemisphere.

Astronomers have been searching for evidence of planets orbiting it, but none have been found so far.

Other stars on the list include 18 Sco in the Scorpio constellation and 51 Pegasus, the first star outside our solar system found to have an orbiting planet.

Since that discovery in 1995, around 160 extra-solar planets have been found.

Each of the five stars could have a ‘habitable zone’ - also nown as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ - where it is not too hot or cold, but just right for liquid water and therefore life to exist.

Details of the search were presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in St Louis.

Dr Jill Tarter, director of the Centre for SETI Research at Mount View, California, said it was not surprising no messages from extraterrestrials had been heard since SETI’s beginnings in the early 1970s.

Astronomers not only had to be looking in the right place, but also at the right time with the right equipment set up the right way.