Tag: Aliens

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Fiction Science Club

The search for alien civilizations gets a reality check

Zine Tseng at control console of radio telescope
Zine Tseng plays a Chinese radio astronomer in "3 Body Problem." (Credit: Ed Miller / Netflix © 2024)

Fortunately, the real-world search for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations doesn’t have to deal with an alien armada like the one that’s on its way to Earth in “3 Body Problem,” the Netflix streaming series based on Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s award-winning novels. But the trajectory of the search can have almost as many twists and turns as a curvature-drive trip from the fictional San-Ti star system.

Take the Breakthrough Initiatives, for example: Back in 2016, the effort’s billionaire founder, Yuri Milner, teamed up with physicist Stephen Hawking to announce a $100 million project to send a swarm of nanoprobes through the Alpha Centauri star system, powered by light sails. The concept, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, was similar to the space-sail swarm envisioned in Liu’s books — but with the propulsion provided by powerful lasers rather than nuclear bombs.

Today, the Breakthrough Initiatives is focusing on projects closer to home. In addition to the millions of dollars it’s spending to support the search for radio or optical signals from distant planetary systems, it’s working with partners on a miniaturized space telescope to identify planets around Alpha Centauri, a radio telescope that could someday be built on the far side of the moon, and a low-cost mission to look for traces of life within the clouds of Venus.

Breakthrough Starshot, however, is on hold. “This looks to be quite feasible. However, it seems to be something that is still pretty, pretty expensive, and probably wouldn’t be feasible until later in the century,” says Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “So, we’ve put that on hold for a period of time to try to look at, are there near-term applications of this technology, which there may be.”

Worden provides a status report on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — and sorts out science fact from science fiction — on the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Cosmic Space

The air of an alien world lifts hopes of detecting life

Blue exoplanet and red parent star in space
An artist's conception shows the exoplanet K2-18 b. (NASA / CSA / ESA / STScI / Cambridge U.)

Readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope confirm the presence of carbon-based molecules including methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a distant planet known as K2-18 b — which supports previous suggestions that it might be the kind of ocean-covered world capable of harboring marine life.

K2-18 b, which was first detected in 2015 using data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope, lies in the habitable zone of a star system that’s about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo. It’s about 8.6 times as massive as Earth, and astronomers regard it as a sub-Neptune — a type of planet that doesn’t exist in our solar system.

Since its initial detection, astrobiologists have been interested in the world’s potential for habitability. They suspected it might be what’s called a Hycean planet — a type of world that’s massive enough to hold onto a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning sea. The evidence has been piling up: In 2019, researchers reported the chemical signature of water vapor and clouds in K2-18 b’s atmosphere.

The fact that JWST detected an abundance of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), along with a shortage of ammonia (NH3), is consistent with the atmospheric modeling for Hycean planets.

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Fiction Science Club

How we’ll find the first evidence of extraterrestrial life

Illustration: A variety of planets
Astronomers have detected thousands of planets, including dozens that are potentially habitable. (NASA Illustration)

When will we find evidence for life beyond Earth? And where will that evidence be found? University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey, the author of a book called “Worlds Without End,” is betting that the first evidence will come to light within the next decade or so.

But don’t expect to see little green men or pointy-eared Vulcans. And don’t expect to get radio signals from a far-off planetary system, as depicted in the 1992 movie “Contact.”

Instead, Impey expects that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — or one of the giant Earth-based telescopes that’s gearing up for observations — will detect the spectroscopic signature of biological activity in the atmosphere of a planet that’s light-years away from us.

“Spectroscopic data is not as appealing to the general public,” Impey admits in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “People like pictures, and so spectroscopy never gets its fair due in the general talk about astronomy or science, because it’s slightly more esoteric. But it is the tool of choice here.”

https://radiopublic.com/fiction-science-GAxyzK/s1!1a44a

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Universe Today

SETI researchers are simulating alien contact

Allen Telescope Array in California.
Radio telescopes monitor the sky at the Allen Telescope Array in California. (SETI Institute Photo)

Is it a multimedia art project? Or a rehearsal for alien contact? Let’s call it both: Researchers specializing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are working with a media artist to stage the receipt of an interstellar message — and a global effort to decode the message.

The project, titled “A Sign in Space,” is orchestrated by media artist Daniela de Paulis in collaboration with the SETI Institute, the European Space Agency, the Green Bank Observatory and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (also known as INAF).

The metaphorical curtain rises on May 24, when ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter transmits an encoded radio message from Martian orbit to Earth at 19:00 UTC / noon PDT.

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GeekWire

How ‘Big Data’ can help scientists focus the search for E.T.

Gaia spacecraft
Artwork shows the Gaia spacecraft against the background of the Milky Way. (ESA Illustration / D. Ducros)

Could far-off aliens be sending out signals telling us they exist? If so, how would we know where to look? Researchers focusing on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have laid out a new strategy for focusing their quest.

The strategy applies simple trigonometry to millions of data points, with the aim of seeking out potential interstellar beacons that are synchronized with hard-to-miss astronomical phenomena such as supernovae.

University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.

“I think the technique is very straightforward. It’s dealing with triangles and ellipses, things that are like high-school geometry, which is sort of my speed,” Davenport told GeekWire half-jokingly. “I like simple shapes and things I can calculate easily.”

The pre-print paper, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, draws upon data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia sky-mapping mission. But Davenport said the technique is tailor-made for the terabytes of astronomical data that will be coming from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory nightly when it goes online, a couple of years from now.

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Universe Today

NASA sets up independent study on UFO sightings

Apollo 16 "flying saucer" image
NASA says this "flying saucer" image from Apollo 16 actually shows the spacecraft's EVA boom and floodlight. (NASA Photo)

NASA has dipped into the debate over UFOs for decades, but today the space agency said it’s commissioning an independent study team to survey a wide range of what are now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

“The most exciting things in science are things we don’t understand, and my starting point — I think all our starting points for this — is that there are phenomena that we don’t understand,” astrophysicist David Spergel, who’ll lead the study team, told reporters.

“How do we start to make progress?” he said. “We have a very limited set of observations right now with these UAPs. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions. So we start by trying to figure out what data is out there. We’re going to be working with government, nonprofits, companies, civilians, and try to identify what data is already there, then start to think about what data should we collect in the future.”

NASA’s independent study will start early in the fall and run in parallel to the Pentagon-led effort to analyze UAP reports from aviators, which was the focus of a congressional hearing last month.

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Cosmic Space

The long goodbye begins for iconic radio dish

Satellite image of Arecibo radio telescope
A Nov. 17 satellite image shows gashes in the Arecibo radio telescope. (Satellite image ©2020 Maxar Technologies)

The radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory is on its way to extinction after 57 years of sparking dreams of alien contact — and after a grim three years of weathering nature’s blows.

Two of the cables supporting the telescope’s 900-ton instrument platform have slipped loose, ripping through the 1,000-foot-wide web of aluminum panels and steel cables that’s spread 450 feet below.

Engineers assessed the damage and determined that the risk of a catastrophic failure was too great to attempt repairs. If more cables snap, the entire platform could crash down, potentially causing the dish’s collapse and life-threatening injuries to workers.

“Although it saddens us to make this recommendation, we believe the structure should be demolished in a controlled way as soon as pragmatically possible, ” Thornton Tomasetti, the engineering firm that made the structural assessment, said in its recommendations to the National Science Foundation and the University of Central Florida, which manages operations at Arecibo on the NSF’s behalf.

“It is therefore our recommendation to expeditiously plan for decommissioning of the observatory and execute a controlled demolition of the telescope,” the firm said.

After consulting with other engineering firms and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NSF decided to go ahead with the decommissioning.

“NSF prioritizes the safety of workers, Arecibo Observatory’s staff and visitors, which makes this decision necessary, although unfortunate,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement.

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GeekWire

Arecibo makes plans for new message to aliens

Arecibo Message
A global contest will give the 1974 Arecibo Message a reboot. (Arecibo Observatory Illustration)

The Arecibo Observatory today kicked off a student-focused competition to design a new message to beam to extraterrestrials, 44 years to the day since the first deliberate message was sent out from Arecibo’s 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope.

“Our society and our technology have changed a lot since 1974,” Francisco Cordova, the observatory’s director, said in a news release. “So if we were assembling our message today, what would it say? What would it look like? What one would need to learn to be able to design the right updated message from the earthlings? Those are the questions we are posing to young people around the world through the New Arecibo Message – the global challenge.”

It’s not just about the message, however: Competitors will have to solve brain-teasing puzzles posted on Arecibo’s website in order to qualify, get instructions, register and submit their designs. Along the way, they’ll learn about space science, the scientific method and Arecibo’s story.

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GeekWire

Was interstellar object an alien sail? Not so fast

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

‘Oumuamua is long gone from the inner solar system, but the mystery surrounding the interstellar interloper has been rekindled, thanks to a research paper written by two Harvard astronomers.

The paper, suggesting that the cigar-shaped object could have been an alien light sail, sparked headlines as well as skepticism from colleagues claiming that the astronomers were jumping to conclusions.

Among the skeptics is Doug Vakoch, who heads up METI, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to the study of alien contact. (The acronym stands for “Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”)

“I’d love to think that ‘Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial spacecraft that whipped past Earth, propelled by a stream of photons hitting its solar sail. But we need to be wary of conjuring up an explanation that fits the data gathered at one point in time, when we have no opportunity for follow-up observations,” Vakoch told me in an email.

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GeekWire

NASA turns to the search for technosignatures

Image: Alien megastructure
An artist’s representation  shows a megastructure known as a Dyson sphere capturing the energy from a distant star. Such a structure could create observable technosignatures pointing to the civilization behind its construction. (Credit: Danielle Futselaar / SETI International)

It’s been a quarter-century since Congress cut off NASA funding for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, but now the space agency is revisiting the topic under another name: technosignatures.

“I’m excited to announce that NASA is taking the 1st steps to explore ways to search for life advanced enough to create technosignatures: signs or signals, which if observed, would let us infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a tweet today.

The search is the focus of a workshop taking place this week at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, with experts on the search for exoplanets, artificial radio signals and other potential pointers in attendance. House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, is due to give a welcome message.

That’s a far cry from 1993, when a congressional effort spearheaded by Sen. Richard Bryan killed off NASA’s 10-year SETI program, which was known as the High Resolution Microwave Survey, or HRMS. “This hopefully will be the end of Martian hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense,” Bryan declared at the time.

Since then, much has changed.

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