The search for life on exoplanets takes a fairly conservative approach. It focuses on life that is similar to that of Earth.
It’s time to think beyond “Earth-like” exoplanets and turn to some truly unusual places to find alien life: the exomoons of rogue planets in the Milky Way.
Just supposing there is a God(s) ; are He/ She /It interplanetary or are we likely to experience a similar ruinous manifistation of the discord seen here on Earth as the varoius factions of ‘the Godly’. come together? If so, it may be time to start smelting down the plough-shares again.
A Rabbi, an Imam, and a Christian theologian on what life in space could mean for the spiritual.
How do stellar outbursts affect the planets that orbit them?
Scientists surveyed thousands of stars to understand the impact they have on their orbiting planets’ habitability.
There may be life in Enceladus’ deep sea plumes.
The Cassini probe revealed a subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus’ icy surface that may be habitable. A new analysis shows that the chemistry has the right stuff.
A free-floating planet (FFP) is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Centre. The presence of exomoons orbiting FFPs has been theoretically predicted by several models. Under specific conditions, these moons are able to retain an atmosphere capable of ensuring the long-term thermal stability of liquid water on their surface. We model this environment with a one-dimensional radiative-convective code coupled to a gas-phase chemical network including cosmic rays and ion-neutral reactions. We find that, under specific conditions and assuming stable orbital parameters over time, liquid water can be formed on the surface of the exomoon. The final amount of water for an Earth-mass exomoon is smaller than the amount of water in Earth oceans, but enough to host the potential development of primordial life.
Life on Mars may be freeze-dried.
But there’s a solution: freeze-dry it.
In a first-of-its-kind experiment, a team of Japanese researchers freeze-dried samples of mice sperm and sent them aboard the ISS to see how well this crucial element of human life (and, well, a lot of life on Earth) will fair against the harsh radiation of space.
Even after six long years aboard the ISS, the team found that the mice’s space sperm sired equally healthy pups as its terrestrial control. An additional X-ray experiment predicts that this positive outcome could persist with up to 200 years of space radiation exposure.
They’ve only gone and upended a widely held scientific idea.
Lilia Koelemay, a graduate researcher at the University of Arizona, said in a statement about the study that “the detection of these organic molecules at the galactic edge may imply that organic chemistry is still prevalent at the outer reaches of the galaxy, and the [galatic habitable zone] may extend much further from the galactic center than the currently established boundary.”
Koelemay also said, “The widely held assumption was that in the outskirts of our galaxy, the chemistry necessary to form organics just doesn’t occur.”
What’s next — The new finding overturns this assumption, and researchers can now widen the search for life to stars closer to the galaxy’s outer edge, a no-man’s-land of cold matter, isolated stars, and black holes left from long-ago stellar explosions. It’s a place Koelemay says has fewer stars like our life-giving Sun.
The Science of Aliens, Part III: Have they overcome their savage past or might they want to eat us?
Reviewing our own species’ behavior suggests a cautious approach to contact with extraterrestrials.
In about three years, NASA plans to launch a robotic orbiter that will study Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa.
In three years, NASA will launch an orbiter to study Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa. It is possible that Europa harbors hydrothermal vents and even life.
5. Mars meteorite ALH 84001
These space “mushrooms” were not the first claim of alien life. On August 7, 1996, the then-President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the possibility that scientists had discovered the ancient, fossilized remains of micro-organisms in a meteorite that had been recovered from Antarctica in 1984.
The meteorite, ALH 84001, is one of a handful of rocks we have from Mars. These were blasted off the surface of the planet by volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts, drifted through space probably for millions of years, before ending up on Earth.
