Some misc. items on SETI and exoplanets:

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The Planetary Society‘s Planetary Radio program recently webcast two programs about the  Breakthrough Initiative (see earlier post), which plans to spend $10M per year for the next ten years on a search for intelligent life beyond earth.

* Ann Druyan and the Breakthrough SETI Initiatives

The Breakthrough Initiatives will pump $100 million into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the next 10 years, vastly expanding humanity’s quest to learn if it has company in the universe. Among the leaders of this brave new project is Cosmos creator Ann Druyan. Join us for a special, extended conversation with Ann.

* A New Era For SETI Research: More on the Breakthrough Initiatives

We follow last week’s conversation with Ann Druyan about the $100 million funding of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by visiting with two of the scientists who will do the work: Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley and Karen O’Neil of the Green Bank Telescope.

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Here’s an interesting article about the possibility of observing an earth sized planet in the Alpha Centauri system with a small telescope in space: Planet Hunters Bet Big on a Small Telescope to See Alien Earths – Lee Billings/Scientific American Blog Network –

According to Ruslan Belikov and Eduardo Bendek, two research scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, a 45-kilogram space telescope with a 30-to-45-centimeter mirror would be sufficient to deliver images of rocky planets in the habitable zones of either Alpha Centauri A or B. That’s smaller than some of the telescopes you can buy on Amazon.com, though you can’t purchase a planet-imaging space observatory off-the-shelf quite yet. Belikov, Bendek, and their collaborators call the concept ACESat – the Alpha Centauri Exoplanet Satellite – and have submitted it to NASA in response to the agency’s October 2014 call for proposals for Small Explorer missions, which have budgets capped at $175 million. If selected, the mission would be ready to launch no later than the end of 2020.

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More about those odd fast radio bursts (FRBs) : Are aliens trying to contact us? Mathematical radio waves from deep space baffle scientists: Strange bursts of radio waves have a pattern that can’t be explained by known phenomenon – Mother Nature Network

The brevity of the bursts is particularly unusual because it means their source has to be extremely small, hundreds of kilometers across at most. And because they exhibit such a high pulse dispersion — a measure of the distance between the arrival of higher frequency waves within the signal compared to lower frequency waves — scientists believe they come from very far away, possibly another galaxy entirely.

All 10 of the bursts detected so far have dispersion measures that are multiples of a single number: 187.5. That’s the mathematical regularity that is hard to shake off. The breakdown of the pattern implies five sources for the bursts all at regularly spaced distances from Earth, billions of light-years away. Scientists have calculated this to be a five in 10,000 probability of a coincidence. In other words, not likely.

“If the pattern is real, it is very, very hard to explain,” said John Learned, a scientist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa who analyzed the FRBs.

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Update: A comment about exoplanet naming: To Play or Not to Play the Exoplanet Name Game? – Lee Billings/Scientific American Blog Network