Let the little guys shine. The SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Institute is setting its sights on the Liliputians of the galaxy – red dwarf stars – in the hope that someone is home.

Over the next two years, the institute will turn the Allen Telescope Array – a group of 42 antennas in northern California that are dedicated to SETI research – towards 20,000 red dwarf stars to listen for radio signals that might be signs of life.

“Red dwarfs were never considered very interesting for SETI in the past, partly because we’re around a star that’s not a red dwarf,” says Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute. And they do pose some problems: red dwarfs tend to be more active than sun-like stars, shooting out energetic flares that could fry nearby planets.

They’re also so dim that their habitable zone – the region around the star where temperatures are right for liquid water – is close enough that the planets there would be tidally locked to the star, showing the same face to it at all times. That means one side of the planet could be drenched in scorching eternal sunlight, while the other experiences a frigid constant night.

But they make up about 75 per cent of the stars in the Milky Way. Based on new population statistics of planets we’ve found in the last few years, the nearest red dwarf with a rocky planet in the habitable zone could be as close as 6.5 light years away.

They also live billions of years longer than sun-like stars, on average. That gives potential inhabitants a long time to grow up – and perhaps grow smart.

“With these developments in astronomy, it seems like red dwarfs are a good candidate,” Shostak says. “They’ve been in the observing list before but not as a called-out class. They haven’t been given their 15 minutes of fame.”

The new survey will pick targets from a list of about 70,000 red dwarfs compiled by Andrew West at Boston University, and will listen to the stars in radio frequency bands between 1 and 10 gigahertz.

Source: Newscientist.com