imageDennis Overbye in the New York Times:

In a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center here, computers are sifting and resifting the light from 156,000 stars, seeking to find in the flickering of distant suns the first hints that humanity is not alone in the universe.

. . . Over the next two or three years, as Kepler [a $600 million satellite observatory] continues to stare and sift, astronomers say, it will be able to detect planets in the “Goldilocks” zones, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

“What we want is to find life,” said Geoffrey Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is part of the Kepler team.

Shhh. Someone will dream up another weird theory related to the Shroud of Turin.

Full article: Kepler Observatory Seeks More Earths and Other Beings – NYTimes.com