The Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) is a catalogue of

star system A star system or stellar system is a small number of stars that orbit each other, bound by gravitational attraction. A large group of stars bound by gravitation is generally called a '' star cluster'' or ''galaxy'', although, broadly speaking ...

s which conceivably have habitable planets. The list was developed by scientists

Jill Tarter Jill Cornell Tarter (born January 16, 1944) is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence ( SETI). Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver ...

and Margaret Turnbull under the auspices of Project Phoenix, a part of

SETI The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for scientific searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life, for example, monitoring electromagnetic radiation for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other pl ...

. The list was based upon the

Hipparcos Catalogue ''Hipparcos'' was a scientific satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. It was the first space experiment devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of the positions of celestial ...

(which has 118,218 stars) by filtering on a wide range of star system features. The current list contains 17,129 "HabStars".

External links

Target Selection for SETI: 1. A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems
Turnbull, Tarter, submitted 31 Oct 2002 (last accessed 19 Jan 2010)
Target selection for SETI. II. Tycho-2 dwarfs, old open clusters, and the nearest 100 stars
by Turnbull and Tarter, (last accessed 19 Jan 2010)

- an article on the

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...

website Astronomical catalogues of stars Search for extraterrestrial intelligence Exoplanet catalogues {{astronomical-catalogue-stub