Congressional funding for Kepler - which has identified 1,235 candidate alien planets to date and recently discovered the first exoplanet with two suns in its sky - is due to run out in November 2012, but an extension may be approved is the new mission proposal is approved. The NASA Kepler team will know by next spring whether it's approved, notes "THE DAILY GALAXY".
Meanwhile, the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia has detected a radio signal while scanning the exoplanetary candidate KOI 817 discovered by the Kepler mission. This is the kind of signal SETI scientists would expect to find if an alien civilization is transmitting.
"These signals look similar to what we think might be produced from an extraterrestrial technology. They are narrow in frequency, much narrower than would be produced by any known astrophysical phenomena, and they drift in frequency with time, as we would expect because of the Doppler effect imposed by the relative motion of the transmitter and the receiving radio telescope," according to the UC Berkeley SETI team now researching the unusual radio signal from KOI 817.
Currently, no unambiguous alien "HELLO THERE!" has been detected.
Reference: outer-space-guests.blogspot.com
