Allen Telescope Array
Alien-hunting scientists have had an eventful year, and they're about to get busier. In just the past few months, life-friendly soil and ice turned up on Mars, astronomers bagged a trio of Earth-like planets in a distant star system, and scientists looking closer to home reported that certain hardy microbes thrive below Earth's ocean floor—a big clue that life may exist on planets that at first glance appear inhospitable.
None of the findings shout, "Here be aliens!" but each report has stoked optimism among astrobiologists that they will discover life beyond Earth. Some leading stargazers, in fact, suspect we're now on the verge of learning that we're not alone—and that genesis wasn't a unique event.
In space, "everywhere we look, we see the same processes that we think led to the origin of life on Earth," says John Rummel, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology.
In the coming months, two new tools will greatly expand astrobiologists' capacity to hear and see other promising signs of life. Later this summer, the nonprofit SETI Institute, named with the acronym for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, will begin listening for alien broadcasts on the new $50 million Allen Telescope Array. A spread of 42 radio dishes in California's Cascade Mountains, the array is the first such facility built specifically to listen for E.T. "We're looking for life that's clever enough to hold up its side of the conversation," says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. The array, half funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen, will search for alien signals at a clip "hundreds to thousands times faster" than current SETI projects, says Shostak.
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