Extraterrestrial life

From Mike Wall at LiveScience: Alien-life hunters should keep an open mind when scanning the atmospheres of exoplanets, a new study stresses. The time-honored strategy of looking for oxygen is indeed a good one, study team members said; after all, it’s tough for this gas to build up in a planet’s atmosphere if life isn’t there churning it out. “But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” study lead author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a doctoral student in Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. More. But there are no eggs. There is no basket. At this point, now that SETI itself is uncertain about even looking for intelligence as Read More ›

Proven. From SETI’s Seth Shostak at NBC News: Simple math shows how many space aliens may be out there: It’s a lot more than you might imagine! We start with recent research showing that one in six stars hosts a planet hospitable to life. No, not one in a million. One in six. So let’s take that number and run with it. Next we have to make a few assumptions. In particular, if you were given a million Earth-size worlds, what fraction do you think would ever beget technically sophisticated inhabitants? Wait a minute. The NASA bulletin referenced does not use the term hospitable to life. It says The quest to determine if planets like Earth are rare or common Read More ›

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) needs a new name, says spokesperson. From Calla Cofield at Space.com: At a recent meeting of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe, held here at the University of California, Irvine, Tarter explained that the phrase “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” generates an incorrect perception of what scientists in this field are actually doing. A more appropriate title for the field, she said, would be “the search for technosignatures,” or signs of technology created by intelligent alien civilizations. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] At this point, she verges on parody: Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Read More ›

From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: From a seam in one of these hills, a jumble of ancient, orange-Creamsicle rock spills forth: a deposit called the Apex Chert. Within this rock, viewable only through a microscope, there are tiny tubes. Some look like petroglyphs depicting a tornado; others resemble flattened worms. They are among the most controversial rock samples ever collected on this planet, and they might represent some of the oldest forms of life ever found. Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his Read More ›

From Dan Garisto at ScienceNews: Storms of powdery Martian soil are contributing to the loss of the planet’s remaining water. This newly proposed mechanism for water loss, reported January 22 in Nature Astronomy, might also hint at how Mars originally became dehydrated. Researchers used over a decade of imaging data taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to investigate the composition of the Red Planet’s frequent dust storms, some of which are vast enough to circle the planet for months. During one massive dust storm in 2006 and 2007, signs of water vapor were found at unusually high altitudes in the atmosphere, nearly 80 kilometers up. That water vapor rose within “rocket dust storms” — storms with rapid vertical movement — Read More ›

From Alex Barash at Slate: The not-quite life forms have a bad rap. But they’re a reliable sign of life, and it would be exciting to find them in space. For one thing, viruses are an excellent indicator for life itself: Wherever there’s life on Earth, there are viruses, too, and almost invariably in far greater numbers. Some scientists think that’s been true from the very beginning. While we know that RNA, the genetic material that makes up some viruses, came before DNA, the genetic material required by everything else, the fact that all modern viruses depend on cells to reproduce has led to something of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. The NIH’s Eugene V. Koonin has spent decades investigating the evolution Read More ›

According to SciTech Daily in a January 3, 2018 article, Tabby’s star, aka KIC 8462852, has had a mysterious brightening and dimming cycle.  (Such a cycle, of course raises the interesting thought of the erection of a Dyson Sphere or a similar megastructure.) As the article reports: >>A team of more than 200 researchers, including Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the “most mysterious star in the universe.” KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star,” nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an ordinary star, about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, and about than 1,000 light years Read More ›

True, the rumors distract from real science. From Elizabeth Howell at AirSpaceMag: The attention given to such stories has some scientists worried, especially as social media amplifies claims of alien contact over other, more prosaic explanations. “Currently, most SETI-related news seems to be interfering with conventional scientific discoveries, stealing the limelight—without following basic rules of science,” wrote Dutch exoplanet researcher Ignas Snellen of Leiden Observatory, on a Facebook exoplanets discussion group for professional astronomers. Although he has “great respect for SETI scientists,” Leiden wrote, “there is no place for alien civilizations in a scientific discussion on new astrophysical phenomena, in the same way as there is no place for divine intervention as a possible solution. One may view it as Read More ›

From Jeff Wise at New York Magazine: The main article is decidedly short on specifics. There’s a brief reference to “footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves.” A more detailed account is provided in an accompanying sidebar entitled “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen.’” In it, former Navy F/A-18 pilot David Fravor relates his experience during a flight from the aircraft carrier Nimitz on November 14, 2004. While en route to a training mission he was vectored toward an unknown radar contact. Arriving on the scene, he witnessed a lozenge-shaped craft that moved over Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new analysis of the oldest known fossil microorganisms provides strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common. The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old. Scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that two of the species they studied appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis, another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed methane and used it to build their cell walls. The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history — combined with scientists’ knowledge of the vast number Read More ›

Probably not but it is fun now and then to worry about stuff that’s too exotic to really be happening. Most likely, anyway. From Neel V. Patel at Slate: … Anton Shkaplerov, a Russian cosmonaut who has already spent two stints aboard the International Space Station and is gearing up for a third mission to launch on Dec. 18, told Russian state media that scientists have found living bacteria sitting on the exterior of the Russian segment of the ISS. He claims the bacteria is not from Earth—it’s extraterrestrial in origin. Hey, bacteria up there are not impossible: Moreover, the upper reaches of the atmosphere are home to their own array of undiscovered forms of life. Bacteria that has adapted Read More ›

Ed Driscoll offers Party gossip, with links, at Instapundit: —“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” the New York Times today: It’s no secret that the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman is a UFO buff, but the recent WikiLeaks dump of Mr. Podesta’s hacked account sheds new light on how deeply interested he is in extraterrestrial conspiracy theories. “Leaked Podesta emails encourage UFO buffs seeking declassification in a Clinton administration,” the Washington Times, October 16, 2016 He adds, Speaking of “spiritual people,” maybe the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn can use her Ouija board to make contact with the aliens. The truth is out there! More. A growing source of unproductive conflict in western culture: “Science” is becoming merely Read More ›

Despite the recent NASA announcement, which kind of fizzled. From ScienceDaily: Researchers led by space physicist Chuanfei Dong of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have recently raised doubts about water on — and thus potential habitability of — frequently cited exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs, the most common stars in the Milky Way. In two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists develop models showing that the stellar wind — the constant outpouring of charged particles that sweep out into space — could severely deplete the atmosphere of such planets over hundreds of millions of years, rendering them unable to host surface-based life as we know it. “Traditional definition and Read More ›

A mere desire to support the notion that we are nothing special. At 1:00 pm ET, December 14 (yesterday), we were told by NASA: NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data. More. We finally caught up with our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, and he is astounded at why this eighth Kepler planet is supposed to be a big deal: That’s it??? A inside-Mercury-orbiting rock that is over 800 degrees hot? And the Google AI angle was just Read More ›

From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: A new study, one of very few of its kind, finds that people typically respond quite positively to the notion of life on other planets. The study investigated the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrials, not intelligent E.T.s, so people’s responses might be a little different if they were told an armada of aliens were headed toward Earth, cautioned study author Michael Varnum, a psychologist at Arizona State University. Nevertheless, he noted, large portions of people believe that intelligent aliens do exist and that they’ve visited Earth; so even a more dramatic announcement might not ruffle feathers. … “I think there might be something sort of comforting about knowing that life wasn’t an accident that happened Read More ›