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Frank Drakea leading figure in planetary astronomy and astrobiology who inspired the foundation of If youthe program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, is died last September 2 at the age of 92. “Frank was essentially the pioneer of the field of alien life research as a scientific endeavor, being the first to actually conduct such experiments.“said Bill Diamond, president of Seti, a nonprofit research organization, from its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Drake was born in Chicago in 1930. He studied physical engineering at Cornell University and then served as an officer in charge of electronic equipment on a US Navy cruiser for three years. He later earned his PhD in astronomy from Harvard. He started looking for evidence ofexistence of extraterrestrial life in 1960, when he worked for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Nrao) at the telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia. Unbeknownst to him, in 1959, a couple of physicists had published one Research who speculated how far radio signals sent by extraterrestrial civilizations could travel and whether they were still detectable by a receiver on Earth. “The distance was found to be light years – says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer of Seti -. Maybe the space was teeming with signs, but we had never looked for them “.
The Ozma Project and the Drake equation
Drake had already begun to make various attempts in this direction. In 1960 he obtained NRAO approval for the Ozma Project (named after the princess of The Wizard of Oz), the first attempt at a systematic search for alien signals. Each day, for a few hours, he pointed a twenty-six-meter radio telescope into the facility at Tau Ceti and a handful of other stars, looking for peaks or fluctuations above the background noise that might turn out to be signs of intentional transmission. It tuned to a particular range of frequencies, specifically one close to the hydrogen emission line at 21 centimeters (the spectral line of electromagnetic radiation created by a change in the energy state of neutral hydrogen atoms, ndt). Normally, this is a “quiet” part of the spectrum – most worlds have few emissions in that range – which could therefore have been used as a natural “calling frequency”. But aside from a false alarm, possibly due to a plane, Drake and his colleagues only detected static electricity.
Although the Green Bank experiment did not lead to the detection of any alien messages, had shown how to look for them. The National Academy of Sciences contacted Drake to arrange a conference on the subject. In 1961 the event brought together an influential and eclectic group of scientists, including the authors of the 1959 article, a young Carl Sagan – who would later become a regular collaborator of Drake – and the chemist Melvin Calvin, a researcher specializing in dolphin intelligence. On that occasion, the latter discovered that he had won the Nobel Prize.
During the conference, Drake began to develop a fundamental formula which later became known as Drake equation. Still used today in various forms, this formula attempts to estimate the number of existing extraterrestrial civilizations capable of communicating and that may attempt to send us messages. Its variables include the period of birth of the stars, the abundance of planets that orbit around them, the number of those that are habitable, the portion of those on which life could develop, the amount of alien civilizations that could transmit signals. detectable and the estimated duration of such civilizations.
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