When scientists are looking for funding for their projects, they play the game, if their research is not too excites emotions. Excitement inherent most controversial advanced fields of research, but the Agency sponsors prefer to invest in projects that will almost certainly bring a return. "You actually want to show that half of the work has already been done to demonstrate that it is feasible," says Luciana of Walkowitz, an astrophysicist at Princeton University.


Following this standard, the last project of Dr. Valkovic never would have to obtain financing. It intends to begin the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not using such traditional methods as listening to radio or watching the laser flashes. Instead, she wants to check manipulation of whether aliens in any way the light emanating from their stars to send us signals.

The chance to discover aliens under the project of Valkovic may be not too great, but the technique itself search is straightforward. "We proceed from the fact," she says, "that was before we had preconceived notions about what should be similar signals from extraterrestrial intelligence". We believe that this signal should be the same principle which we can understand, because the signal is completely unknown to us, nature is a difficult task.

However, if the aliens are so developed that can make light of their stars to appear blinking, no matter how they do it - this signal we can see at any level of our own technology. In fact, says Walkowitz, "we proceed from the fact that we have already spotted this signal, simply could not recognize because of our prejudices".

So she and her soiskateli (including Princeton University Professor Edwin Turner, who recently suggested that the city alien may be on Pluto), intend to study existing materials: archives Kepler mission, which scans space with 2009 on the subject of stars that are flashing because of the planets that pass along their orbits before them. Kepler also looking for stars that are flashing because they are spots, or because they are periodically closed the other stars, or they change the intensity of the glow on their own inner nature.

What is going to make the team of Valkovic is to use a software algorithm to search for unusual patterns of variability. "We will look for all the signs which we can understand," she says, "but we will also look for things that do not agree with the well-known physical processes".

First of all, they will try to explain unusual variations using traditional physical mechanisms, and this in itself can be an important by-product of the project. A large-scale study of the sky using tools like preparing to launch a Large SYNOPTIC observation telescope (LSST) will inevitably lead to the discovery of a large number of unexpected phenomena, and the work of Valkovic may give preliminary explanation at least part of them.

And when she and her team will exhaust all possibilities plausible natural explanations for the strange flashes, they will be forced to admit that they may have encountered a signal from an alien mind. It is a complex and painstaking work, but it can ever bear fruit.