A New Way To Look For Signs Of Life In The Cosmos Being Launched By British Astronomers

The night sky above Paranal in Chile, where NGTS will be built. In the foreground is the Very Large Telescope. Photograph: Yuri Beletsky/European Southern Observatory British Astronomers Launch Advanced Planet Search To Look For Signs Of Life -- The Guardian Robotic telescopes in Chile's Atacama desert will conduct Next Generation Transit Survey to analyse atmospheres for clues The art of hunting planets has come so far that astronomers can now list hundreds of alien worlds that orbit stars so faint they are not even visible as pinpricks in the clear night sky. Little is known of these far-flung planets. The most conspicuous are huge, the size of Jupiter, and scorched from circling so close to their suns. Others are giant iceballs, or waterworlds, or even rocky like Earth. But the finer details are a mystery, the stuff of speculation more than science. Read more .... My Comment: This is what I call exciting work.

Life On Mars?

Viking 2 Lander image (dated Nov. 2, 1976) showing the rocks of Utopia Planitia in the background. NASA

Mars Viking Robots 'Found Life' -- Discovery News

Mathematical analysis adds to growing body of work questioning the negative results of a life-detection experiment 36 years ago.

* New results question the finding that the Mars Viking experiments did not find life.
* The analysis was based on studying the mathematically complexity of the experiment results.
* The idea is that living systems are more complicated than purely physical ones, a concept that can be represented mathematically.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Read more ....

My Comment: One more reason on why we she go back.

'Advanced' Dinosaurs On Other Planets?

New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs -- monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans -- may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe. (Credit: © DX / Fotolia)

Could 'Advanced' Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets? -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2012) — New scientific research raises the possibility that advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs -- monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans -- may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe. "We would be better off not meeting them," concludes the study, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Read more ....

My Comment: Intelligence dinosaurs?

Recipe For Water: Just Add Starlight

Giant star IRC+10216. (Credit: ESA/PACS/SPIRE/MESS Consortia)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2010) — ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that ultraviolet starlight is the key ingredient for making water in space. It is the only explanation for why a dying star is surrounded by a gigantic cloud of hot water vapour.

Read more ....

Don’t Talk To Aliens, Warns Stephen Hawking

Hawking has depicted what kinds of alien could be out there

From Times Online:

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Read more ....

Good Prospects For Extraterrestrial Life? Rocky Planets 'Are Commonplace' In Our Galaxy

An artist's impression of a massive asteroid belt in orbit around a star. (Credit: NASA-JPL / Caltech / T. Pyle (SSC))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2010) — An international team of astronomers have discovered compelling evidence that rocky planets are commonplace in our Galaxy. Leicester University scientist and lead researcher Dr Jay Farihi surveyed white dwarfs, the compact remnants of stars that were once like our Sun, and found that many show signs of contamination by heavier elements and possibly even water, improving the prospects for extraterrestrial life.

Read more ....

Evidence For Life On Mars May Be Staring Us In The Face

Sulphur in silence (Image: NASA/SPL)

From New Scientist:

THE footprint of life on Mars may have been plain to see all along in the sulphurous minerals that litter the planet's surface. What's more, the next Mars lander should be able to detect the evidence.

No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars - it is more abundant there than on Earth - and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now the prospects for this technique look better than ever.

Read more ....

First Contact: The Man Who'll Welcome Aliens

We don't want anybody just turning a radio ­telescope on the sky and sending their own ­messages to the source.' Photograph: Felix Clay

From The Guardian:

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I'm having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he's chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They're a group of the world's most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet's alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn't take lightly.

Read more ....

The Mystery Of The Silent Aliens

From New Scientist:

Sixty years ago, space aliens were the preserve of lunatics and eccentrics, thanks to decades of sci-fi schlock, flying-saucer nonsense and Lowellian fantasies of Martian canals. Then, in 1950, came Enrico Fermi and his paradox - "Where the hell is everyone?" - and, 10 years later, the first attempts to put the search for ET on a scientific footing, courtesy of Frank Drake, who pointed a radio telescope at Tau Ceti and heard... silence.

Read more ....

Satellite TV 'Making Humans Invisible To Aliens On Other Planets'

The digital age is effectively gagging the Earth by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space Photo: REX

From The Telegraph:

Satellite television and the digital revolution is making humanity more and more invisible to inquisitive aliens on other planets, the world's leading ET hunter has said.

That might be good news for anyone who fears an ''Independence Day'' – style invasion by little green men. But it is also likely to make the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by Earthly scientists harder, Dr Frank Drake believes.

Dr Drake, who founded the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) organisation in the US 50 years ago, said the digital age was effectively gagging the Earth by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space.

Read more ....

Earth Calling: A Short History Of Radio Messages To ET

Advertising our existence (Image: Jess Alford/Getty)

From New Scientist:

The human race first deliberately advertised its existence on the outer panels of space probes, some of which were engraved with codes and images containing information about itself. These immediately prompted arguments about how much we should give away about ourselves.

However, if we really want to break the ice with our cosmic neighbours, it will probably be by sending messages that travel at the speed of light, not at the speed of a Pioneer probe.

Read more ....

Looking For Life As We Know It

The Australia Telescope array near Narrabri, New South Wales, with Mercury, Venus, and the Moon all is the same stretch of sky. It's the 50th anniversary of attempts to search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Credit: Graeme L. White and Glen Cozens/James Cook University

From Cosmos:

Some scientists are convinced life is common in the universe, but intelligence rare. As for how long civilisations last - and stay detectable - few are willing to hazard a guess.

Two young physicists at Cornell University in upstate New York, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, had long been interested in gamma rays. One spring day in 1959, Cocconi posed an intriguing question: wouldn’t gamma rays be perfect for communication between the stars?

The discussion that followed led to a two-page article in the British journal Nature entitled “Searching for interstellar communications”. Sandwiched between a paper on the electronic prediction of swarming in bees and one on metabolic changes induced in red blood cells by X-rays, the duo argued that if advanced extraterrestrial civilisations existed, and wanted to communicate, they would likely use radio.

Read more ....

'Goldilocks' Zone Bigger Than Once Thought

Some scientists think we don't have to look past our own solar system to find
a world that could support life. NASA/JPL-Caltech

From Discovery News:

To find worlds within the "Goldilocks" zone, where conditions to support life are just right, look no further than our own solar system.

The holy grail for finding worlds beyond Earth that are hospitable to life has been planets just the right distance from their mother stars where liquid water can exist on the surface -- the so-called "Goldilocks" zone.

But scientists now say this elusive zone where conditions are not too hot and not too cold for life to exist is far bigger than originally thought.

Read more ....

2010 Preview: Waiting For ET To Phone

On the lookout for intelligent signals from the stars (Image: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis)

From New Scientist:

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Read more ....

Avatar's Moon Pandora Could Be Real, Planet-Hunters Say

This artist's conception shows a hypothetical gas giant planet with an Earth-like moon similar to the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar. New research shows that, if we find such an "exomoon" in the habitable zone of a nearby star, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study its atmosphere and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water. The key is to find a planet that transits its star, and then find a moon orbiting that planet more than one stellar radius away, so that the moon can be studied independently of the planet. Moreover, an alien moon orbiting the gas giant planet of a red dwarf star may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths. (Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 18, 2009) — In the new blockbuster Avatar, humans visit the habitable -- and inhabited -- alien moon called Pandora. Life-bearing moons like Pandora or the Star Wars forest moon of Endor are a staple of science fiction. With NASA's Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact.

If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.

Read more ....

Discovery Of New Planets Raises Hopes Of Other Life In Universe

Astronomers have discovered four new planets Photo: NASA/AP

From The Telegraph:

Astronomers have discovered four new planets orbiting two stars similar to Earth's sun, raising hopes that other life may exist in the universe.

However, the stars are 28 and 84 light years away – placing them far beyond the reach of existing spacecraft.

The first three planets orbit the star 61 Virginis and can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation of Virgo.

Read more ....

Super-Earths Orbit Neighboring Stars

Astronomers have found up to six new planets orbiting stars that resemble the sun, paving the way forward for the discovery of a truly extraterrestrial Earth. NASA

From Discovery News:

The discovery of up to six planets breaks new ground in the search for worlds like our own.

The race to find Earth-like planets around stars similar to our sun edged closer to a finish with the announcement on Monday that up to six "super-Earths" have been found orbiting sun-like neighbor stars.

The smallest of the bunch weighs in at about five times the mass of Earth and orbits a star known as 61 Virginis, which is visible with the naked eye in the constellation Virgo. The star is 28 light-years from Earth and closely resembles the sun in size, age and other attributes.

Read more ....

Life On Mars Theory Boosted By New Methane Study

This image shows concentrations of Methane discovered on Mars. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 8, 2009) — Scientists have ruled out the possibility that methane is delivered to Mars by meteorites, raising fresh hopes that the gas might be generated by life on the red planet, in research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Read more ....

School IT Director Loses Job Over Space Alien Hunt

Photo: Silhouette of Very Large Array (VLA), which has contributed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In Arizona, a school IT director lost his job over a hunt for alien life. Newscom

From Christian Science Monitor:

District says the former employee's quest for ET will cost it $1.2 million.

The hunt for alien life led one Arizona man on a hunt for a new job.

Brad Niesluchowski used his role as information technology director of an Arizona school district to install SETI@home on computers at work. The free program, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at the University of California at Berkeley, downloads and analyzes data from a radio telescope constantly scanning the cosmos for galactic neighbors.

Read more ....

Cool Find In Hunt For Exoplanets

Image: The planet, called GJ758B, may well have a sister, GJ758C

From The BBC:

Astronomers have published an image of the coolest planet outside our solar system that has been pictured directly.

The new find is more similar to our own Solar System than prior pictured exoplanets, in terms of the parent star's type and the planet's size.

However, the surface temperature is a scorching 280-370C, and could still prove to be a brown dwarf star.

The results, published in Astrophysical Journal, were obtained by a new camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii.

Among more than 400 known exoplanets, only 10 have been imaged directly, rather than detecting them via measurements of their parent stars' light or movement.

Read more ....