New telescope to probe life in stars

A privately funded institution, which has been searching for signs of life in the skies for decades, has now got a new telescope specifically built to search for life in stars.

The telescope, when completed, said The Washington Post, will be so powerful that it will be able to look at more stars in a year or two than astronomers have been able to do in the past 45 years.

"The absence of a signal so far is not particularly compelling," said astronomer Michael M Davis, an adjunct professor emeritus at Cornell University who recently joined the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California to oversee the telescope project.

"We could have a billion intelligent cultures with radio waves buzzing around them but we have not had the capability to detect them," Davis said.