August 6, 2001 Scientists hunt for light flashes from extraterrestrial intelligence By Seth Shostak, SETI Institute, and Tim Stephens A team of astronomers from several California institutions is broadening the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) with a new experiment to look for powerful light pulses beamed our way from other star systems. Physics student Shelley Wright lines up the Lick Observatory's Nickel Telescope to search for light pulses from extraterrestrial civilizations. The detector she built is housed in the white case mounted to the rear of the telescope. Photo: SETI Institute. Scientists from UCSC, Lick Observatory, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, and UC Berkeley are coupling the observatory's 40-inch Nickel Telescope with a new pulse-detection system capable of finding laser beacons from civilizations many light-years distant. Unlike other optical SETI searches, this new experiment is largely immune to false alarms that slow the reconnaissance of target stars. "This is perhaps the most sensitive optical SETI search yet undertaken," said Frank Drake, chairman of the board of the SETI Institute and professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Drake, who in 1960 conducted the first modern hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, is usually associated with radio SETI, an approach in which large antennas are connected to specialized, multi-million channel receivers. "This is different," noted Drake. "We are looking for very brief but powerful pulses of laser light from other planetary systems, rather than the steady whine of a radio transmitter." While optical SETI has been undertaken before, it is only recently that major experiments, scrutinizing hundreds or even thousands of star systems, have been initiated. This is largely the consequence of a study conducted by the SETI Institute during the years 1997 to 1999, which showed that new technology has made optical SETI an appealing approach for finding technologically sophisticated civilizations. However, unlike its radio counterpart, optical SETI requires that any extraterrestrial civilization be deliberately signaling precisely in our direction. "We readily concede this search is speculative, but the potential payoff from this experiment is far too exciting for us to ignore the opportunity," said principal investigator Remington Stone, a research astronomer at Lick Observatory. "During the past decade, astronomers have learned for the first time that planets around other stars are common, which certainly encourages us for our own search," Stone said. "It is a long shot, but what an exciting long shot, and what enormous implications for our view of our own place in the universe." The new experiment is unique in exploiting three light detectors (photomultipliers) to search for bright pulses that arrive in a short period of time (less than a billionth of a second). Of course, light from the central star will trigger the detectors as well, but seldom will all three photomultipliers be hit by photons within a billionth of a second time frame. The expected number of false alarms for the stars being looked at is about one per year. Other optical SETI experiments use only one or two detectors and have been plagued by false alarms occurring on a daily basis. Starlight, cosmic rays, muon showers, and radioactive decays in the glass of photomultiplier tubes can all contribute confusing "events" to optical SETI searches. Dan Werthimer and Richard Treffers of UC Berkeley designed the hardware and software for the new, three-tube system. It was built by Shelley Wright, an undergraduate physics student at UCSC, under the direction of Stone. The astronomers expect that the new approach will produce a clean experiment that can be run automatically, and for which the results will be far less ambiguous. So far, the experiment at Lick Observatory has examined about 300 individual star systems, as well as a few star clusters. The intention is to continue the search at least on a weekly basis for the coming year. The project is being sponsored by the SETI Institute. "One great advantage of optical SETI is that there's no terrestrial interference," commented Drake. "It's an exciting new field."