Meet the Neighbours
If history had turned out a little differently, Todd Henry might have become a leading light in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Instead, for the last quarter of a century he’s been leading the charge to learn all that we can about the nearest stars.
Henry graduated from Cornell University in the 1980s, where one of his advisors had been none other than Carl Sagan. With such inspiration, it’s little surprise that after completing his PhD he opted to join NASA’s SETI project, which was to be a huge 10-year quest to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. Yet just a year after observations began, the rug was pulled out from under the project as Congress cancelled its funding.
Still, the questions that SETI posed remained with Henry. If life exists on other worlds, where are those worlds? The closest stars would seem to be a reasonable place to start.
However, our stellar neighbours just didn’t seem to interest most astronomers. “The nearby stars just haven’t been sexy for all that long,” says Henry (Georgia State University). To remedy this, in 1994 he formed RECONS, the Research Consortium On Nearby Stars, with the primary goal of mapping and characterising all the stars within 10 parsecs (ie. 32.6 light-years), and later extending that to 25 and 100 pc (81.5 and 326 light-years, respectively).
Obtaining funding was difficult at first. Henry had to constantly emphasise that the nearest stars worth studying, particularly since no one else was really looking at them. By 2003, though, his team was able to take over
