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Archive for the ‘alien life’ category: Page 68

Nov 24, 2020

Amateur astronomer Alberto Caballero finds possible source of Wow! signal

Posted by in category: alien life

Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, Caballero describes searching the Gaia database for possible sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life.

Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope—at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio—recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space. It was so strong and unusual that one of the workers on the team, Jerry Ehman, famously scrawled the word Wow! on the printout. Despite years of work and many man hours, no one has ever been able to trace the source of the signal or explain the strong, unique signal, which lasted for all of 72 seconds. Since that time, many people have suggested the only explanation for such a strong and unique signal is extraterrestrial .

In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the source was some other , it would likely be living on an exoplanet—and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth—one circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion .

Nov 23, 2020

A New Place to Look for Life on Mars

Posted by in category: alien life

Where to search for life on Mars: look for subsurface water-containing clay like smectite.

Nov 23, 2020

Arthur C Clarke Remains Among Those Expected To Fly To The Moon Next Summer

Posted by in categories: alien life, robotics/AI

Just amazing!


A small fraction of the cremated remains of 61 people will be flown to the Moon next July as part of the payload delivered by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One lander. The payload is offered by Celestis, a company that provides memorial spaceflights. This particular one has intrigued people because among the many deceased whose ashes will be taken to the moon, there are the remains of science writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.

Clarke is known to most people for being the author of 2001 – A Space Odyssey, a book in which an ancient alien civilization left one of its peculiar monoliths on the Moon. In the novel, this monolith is found in Tycho crater, but that is not where the Peregrine mission is landing. More aptly, the Astrobotic mission will land in a basaltic lava plain known as Lacus Mortis: the lake of death.

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Nov 22, 2020

Alien Worlds

Posted by in category: alien life

Applying the laws of life on Earth to the rest of the galaxy, a new series blends science fact and fiction to imagine alien life on other planets.

“Astronomers think it’s only a matter of time before some alien life forms are discovered,” says the narrator of Alien Worlds, which debuts exclusively on Netflix from 2nd December 2020.

But what might it look like, and how similar would it be to the animals and plants we are familiar with? The new show will attempt to answer that question as it features a dizzying variety of crawling, slithering, flying and swimming creatures depicted in gorgeous, high-quality CGI.

Nov 20, 2020

Iconic Arecibo Alien-Hunting Observatory Will Be Demolished

Posted by in categories: alien life, entertainment, mathematics

It’s a sad day. The observatory has not only been used to observe radio wave signals in deep space. It’s also become an iconic landmark over the decades after being featured in countless films and TV shows including the 1995 James Bond blockbuster “GoldenEye.”

The observatory has also made significant contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), spotting mysterious radio signals emanating from distant corners of the universe.

“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but safety of people is our number one priority,” Sean Jones, the assistant director for the mathematical and physical sciences directorate at NSF, told reporters today over a conference call, as quoted by The Verge.

Nov 18, 2020

Life on Mars? Elon Musk says Starship rockets ‘designed to make life multiplanetary’

Posted by in categories: alien life, Elon Musk

Leave it to Elon Musk to think of putting life on other planets before we’ve even gone back to the moon.

Musk said the capability of SpaceX’s Starship rockets is “designed to make life multiplanetary,” before eventually building a city on Mars.

Nov 16, 2020

The building blocks of life can form even without stars or planets, scientists say

Posted by in categories: alien life, chemistry

Interesting.


The building blocks of life can form even before there are stars or planets, a team of researchers have found in a study.

The new research looked at “dark chemistry”, or the ways that new kinds of materials can form without energetic radiation.

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Nov 13, 2020

Giant Arecibo SETI Telescope Could Collapse After Mysterious Damage

Posted by in category: alien life

The cause of the crashes remain unclear. The Arecibo Observatory was built in the 1960s and has been in used for decades to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Experts are worried cables could corrode further as they age.

The radio telescope, among the world’s largest single-dish radio telescopes, is now in a sorry state — and at risk of total collapse.

“For me, it’s probably fifty-fifty,” former observatory director Michael Nolan from the University of Arizona told National Geographic. “They are doing what can be done. I’m still really worried that they can’t do enough.”

Nov 10, 2020

Researchers model source of eruption on Jupiter’s moon Europa

Posted by in category: alien life

On Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, powerful eruptions may spew into space, raising questions among hopeful astrobiologists on Earth: What would blast out from miles-high plumes? Could they contain signs of extraterrestrial life? And where in Europa would they originate? A new explanation now points to a source closer to the frozen surface than might be expected.

Rather than originating from deep within Europa’s oceans, some eruptions may originate from water pockets embedded in the icy shell itself, according to new evidence from researchers at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Using images collected by the NASA spacecraft Galileo, the researchers developed a model to explain how a combination of freezing and pressurization could lead to a cryovolcanic eruption, or a burst of water. The results, published Nov. 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, have implications for the habitability of Europa’s underlying ocean—and may explain eruptions on other icy bodies in the solar system.

Nov 9, 2020

Milky Way holds at least 300 MILLION habitable planets, NASA claims

Posted by in category: alien life

There are around 300 million planets that exist outside our Solar System but within the Milky Way which could potentially harbour life. According to research from NASA, four of them are within just 30 light-years from Earth, with the closest just 20 light-years away, NASA claims.

They went in search of the Holy grail of astronomical research, scouring for the ‘Goldilock’s Zone’ where life may thrive.

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