Category: Exoplanets
Rob Sheldon: The skinny on those ten new exoplanets
| June 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
As in: NASA said Monday it has found new evidence of 219 planets outside our Solar System. Ten of those exoplanets appear to be similar to the size of the Earth and orbit their stars in the habitable zone. From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon The Kepler telescope had a glitch in 2013 that […]
Rob Sheldon: Are the seven new planets, three “habitable,” just hype? Read the fine print.
| February 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Intelligent Design, News |
Yesterday, NASA reported a record-breaking discovery of seven new Earth-size planets around a single star, three in the habitable zone: The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system [TRAPPIST-1]. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life […]
Religion and ET: What’s wrong with science writing today
| December 19, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Media, Religion |
Exhibit A: “If we made contact with aliens, how would religions react?” From Brandon Ambrosino at BBC: The discovery of life on another planet might seem incompatible with faith in a deity. Yet many theologians are already open to the existence of extraterrestrials, argues the writer Brandon Ambrosino. In 2014, Nasa awarded $1.1M to the […]
Exoplanets: Robbing the term “Earth-like” of meaning
| October 22, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Intelligent Design, News |
From Nathaniel Sharping at Discover blogs: Every time astronomers discover another exoplanet, the first question is,”Does it look like Earth?” Finding an Earth-like exoplanet would certainly increase our chances of finding life, as we know it, on that distant world. We could finally prove that we’re not all alone in this big, cold universe. But, […]
Mashable: Quit promoting just any new planet as Earth-like
| August 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, News |
From science writer Miriam Kramer at Mashable: Yes, it’s amazing that this possibly rocky planet is orbiting a star just 4 light-years away, possibly close enough to one day launch a mission to, but there is still so much we don’t know about this brave new world. Plus, Proxima b is far from being a […]
Rob Sheldon on the new Earth-like planet
| August 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets |
From Jacob Aron at New Scientist, A planet just 30 per cent more massive than Earth orbits in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.25 light years away. How Earth-like is it really? … The planet – Proxima b – was discovered by astronomers who spent years looking for signs of the […]
New Earth-like planet?
| August 12, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, News |
Don’t bet the farm but, from a href=”http://phys.org/news/2016-08-scientists-unveil-earth-like-planet.html” target=”another”>Phys.org: The exoplanet orbits a well-investigated star called Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the magazine said, quoting anonymous sources. “The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid […]
NPR: Were There Aliens Before Us?
| July 16, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
Asks Adam Frank: Earlier this year, my colleague Woody Sullivan and I published a paper in the journal Astrobiology presenting new results that, I believe, throw new light on the ancient question. And, based on that work, last month I wrote an OpEd in The New York Times that ran with provocative title “Yes, There […]
Solar system has 10 or more planets?
| June 18, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Intelligent Design, News |
From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: In January, astronomers Professor Konstantin Batygin and Professor Mike Brown from California Institute of Technology predicted the existence of a ninth planet after discovering that 13 objects in the Kuiper Belt – an area beyond Neptune – were all moving together as if ‘lassooed’ by the gravity of a huge […]
Planet better than Earth claimed within reach
| May 20, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, News |
From MacGregor Campbell at at New Scientist: We are used to thinking small when it comes to alien life. Our list of living worlds has a sole data point, Earth, and even our convivial planet seems to have been a tricky place for life to get started. How could we expect more than a self-replicating […]
BBC: Kepler finds 100 Earth-size planets
| May 13, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
From BBC News: It has also detected nine small planets within so-called habitable zones, where conditions are favourable for liquid water – and potentially life. The finds are contained within a catalogue of 1,284 new planets detected by Kepler – which more than doubles the previous tally. … The Nasa Ames researcher said the Kepler […]
700 quintillion reasons to deny Earth is unusual
| February 25, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, News |
From Discover: Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place One of the most fundamental requirements for a planet to sustain life is to orbit in the “habitable zone” of a star — the “Goldilocks” region where the temperature is just right and liquid water can exist. Astronomers have, to this point, discovered around 30 […]
Breaking: Earth special after all
| February 20, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Fine tuning, News |
From Scientific American: More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been further degraded, revealing the cold truth […]
To find alien life, quit being “terra-centric”?”
| February 4, 2016 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, News |
It’s the latest new prejudice. From Quanta, we earn that the presence of oxygen does not show, as formerly thought, that a planet might have life. Oxygen can build up in environments hostile to life: As Domagal-Goldman, then a researcher at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), well knew, the gold standard in […]
More than half of Kepler’s planets are false positives?
| December 4, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
So reports Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Yesterday, results were released from an international team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, where they measured 129 objects-of-interest identified by Kepler for a period of five years. They did spectroscopic analysis, which means they studied the individual wavelengths of light coming from […]
Weirdly tilted exoplanet knocks formation theory out of line
| November 27, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Intelligent Design, News |
From New Scientist: Recent theory: The idea is that smaller, colder stars have thicker atmospheres. “That provides handles with which the star can grab onto the planet and vice versa,” Winn says. Over time, those gravitational handles exert a tidal force on the planet, pulling it and its star into alignment. But then: But one […]
Nature: The Exoplanet Files 20 years on
| November 20, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, News |
From Nature: What we know about alien worlds — and what’s coming next. The tally of known extrasolar planets now stands at 1,978, with nearly 4,700 more candidates waiting to be confirmed. On 29 November, exoplanet researchers will gather in Hawaii to review these extreme solar systems — and map out a path for the […]
Radiation nixes most Earth-like planet for life?
| November 19, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, News |
From Warwick U: The most Earth-like planet could have been made uninhabitable by vast quantities of radiation, new research led by the University of Warwick has found. The atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438. Regularly occurring […]
Earth’s water as old as planet?
| November 15, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, News, Origin Of Life |
From Smithsonian: Ancient volcanic rocks may have preserved tiny samples of the planet’s original moisture A new analysis in Science suggests that at least some of Earth’s current moisture derives from water-soaked dust particles trapped deep inside during the planet’s formation. … The ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the universe was fixed shortly after […]
Oxygen not evidence for exoplanet life?
| October 6, 2015 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, News |
Further to: There are millions of habitable planets… no and Rob Sheldon reflects on the hunt for water on Mars, we now hear from Space.com: Oxygen on Exoplanets May Not Mean Alien Life On Earth, plants release oxygen into the air through photosynthesis. If a planet beyond the solar system was found to contain oxygen […]
