Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, according to a new paper by astrobiologists at the Australian National University. In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets. “The universe […]
Looking for life on other planets is not straightforward. Usually, chemical detection is used, but such tests are limited in scope and might be completely irrelevant to esoteric alien biology. Motion is a trait of all life, but detecting the tiny movements of microorganisms requires incredible sensitivity. Now, Swiss scientists say they have developed an […]
By combining the Earth-based science of sustainability with the space-oriented field of astrobiology, two astrophysicists are attempting to answer questions about humanity’s future in the broadest astronomical context. In their paper, which appears in the journalAnthropocene, Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan (both from the University of Rochester) propose that climate change, ocean acidification, and species […]
Harvard-Smithsonian scientists speculate that little green men may not be “green” at all, and finding them might be a simple matter of looking for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of exoplanets. The remote analysis of distant planets for signs of pollution is discussed in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal and the scientists who […]
A team of scientists who have been modeling the subsurface ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa say that the ocean’s deep currents and circulation patterns likely create heat and energy transfers capable of sustaining biological life. The researchers behind the exciting new finding, from the University of Texas at Austin, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and […]
Detecting extraterrestrial life from tell-tale atmospheric signatures is much easier to do when the planet under observation is orbiting a dying star, say Harvard Smithsonian scientists who believe that white dwarf systems are the best candidates for catching our first glimpse of life outside our solar system. Explaining their reasoning in Monthly Notices of the […]
The Kepler space telescope has identified a large, rocky exoplanet with a surface temperature of about 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees F, comparable to a comfortable spring day on Earth). The discovery represents the first detection of a possibly habitable world in orbit around a star much like our own Sun. The team behind the […]
Like life on Earth, extraterrestrial life should create an environment with a large amount of molecules that favor one kind of handedness, and now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) believe we may be able to identify life-harboring planets by looking for left- (or right-) handed reflected light from these planets. […]
