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Category: alien life – Page 19

Exoplanets are common in our galaxy, and some even orbit in the so-called habitable zone of their star. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been busy observing a few of these small, potentially habitable planets, and astronomers are now hard at work analyzing Webb data. We invite Drs. Knicole Colón and Christopher Stark, two Webb project scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, to tell us more about the challenges in studying these other worlds:

A potentially habitable planet is often defined as a planet similar in size to Earth that orbits in the ‘habitable zone’ of its star, a location where the planet could have a temperature where liquid water could exist on its surface. We currently know of around 30 planets that may be small, rocky planets like Earth and that orbit in the habitable zone. However, there is no guarantee that a planet that orbits in the habitable zone actually is habitable (it could support life), let alone inhabited (it currently supports life). At the time of writing, there is only one known habitable and inhabited planet—Earth.

The potentially habitable worlds Webb is observing are all transiting exoplanets, meaning their orbits are nearly edge-on so that they pass in front of their host stars. Webb takes advantage of this orientation to perform transmission spectroscopy when the planet passes in front of its star. This orientation allows us to examine the starlight filtered through the atmospheres of planets to learn about their chemical compositions.

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Could we identify an alien terraformed planet through the detection of greenhouse gases? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated whether artificial greenhouse gases could be detected from an exoplanet whose alien inhabitants could be attempting to terraform that world, either from trying to control its climate or terraforming an uninhabitable planet into a habitable one. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria and methods for identifying an extraterrestrial civilization, especially with the number of confirmed exoplanets increasing almost weekly.

“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming” said Dr. Edward Schwieterman, who is an Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at the University of California Riverside and lead author of the study. “But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”

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Using observations by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and many other facilities, two international teams of astronomers have discovered a planet between the sizes of Earth and Venus only 40 light-years away. Multiple factors make it a candidate well-suited for further study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

TESS stares at a large swath of the sky for about a month at a time, tracking the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars at intervals ranging from 20 seconds to 30 minutes. Capturing transits — brief, regular dimmings of stars caused by the passage of orbiting worlds — is one of the mission’s primary goals.

“We’ve found the nearest, transiting, temperate, Earth-size world located to date,” said Masayuki Kuzuhara, a project assistant professor at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, who co-led one research team with Akihiko Fukui, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. “Although we don’t yet know whether it possesses an atmosphere, we’ve been thinking of it as an exo-Venus, with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbor in the solar system.”

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The SETI Institute has launched a new grants program to support the advancement of technosignature science, utilizing the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a crucial observatory in the search for extraterrestrial technology. This program, the first of its kind, will fund research ranging from observational techniques to theoretical models in technosignature science, with grants available for non-tenured faculty and post-prelim graduate students. Credit: SETI Institute.

The SETI Institute’s new grants program supports advanced research in detecting extraterrestrial technosignatures with grants up to $100,000, leveraging the capabilities of the Allen Telescope Array.

The SETI Institute has introduced a groundbreaking grants program focused on advancing technosignature science. This unique initiative is designed to fund innovative research that tackles essential observational, theoretical, and technical challenges in the quest for technosignatures, which may reveal signs of past or present extraterrestrial technology.

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O.o!!!! Woah even the news is talking about Dyson spheres now o.o

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — What would be the ultimate solution to the energy problems of an advanced civilization? Renowned British American physicist Freeman Dyson theorized it would be a shell made up of mirrors or solar panels that completely surrounds a star — harnessing all the energy it produces.

“One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star,” wrote Dyson in a 1960 paper in which he first explained the concept.

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