Tag: Astrobiology

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NASA watches 3 planets orbiting a distant dwarf

Image: TRAPPIST-1 planet
An artist’s impression shows an imagined view from the surface one of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth. (Credit: ESO)

Three potentially habitable and definitely weird planets have been detected orbiting an ultracool dwarf star that’s 40 light-years away from Earth. They’re too far to visit anytime soon, but close enough to spark interest from NASA and astrobiologists who want to study the conditions under which life could arise.

“Why are we trying to detect Earthlike planets around the smallest and coolest stars in the solar neighborhood? The reason is simple: Systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology,” Michaël Gillon, an astronomer from the University of Liège in Belgium, said in a news release from the European Southern Observatory. “So if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, this is where we should start to look.”

The discoveries are detailed in a study published today by the journal Nature.

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$100 million pledged for Alpha Centauri mission

Image: Light sail propulsion
An artist’s conception shows how a laser beam could propel a light sail outward toward Alpha Centauri. (Credit: Breakthrough Starshot)

Fueled by an initial $100 million from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, a team laden with big names laid out a multi-decade plan to send flurries of smartphone-sized probes to the Alpha Centauri system, powered by laser-driven light sails.

“For the first time in human history, we can do more than just gaze at the stars,” Milner said today at a New York news conference where the Breakthrough Starshot project was unveiled. “We can actually reach them. It is time to launch the next great leap in human history.”

Eventually, the plan will require billions of dollars more in funding – and much more planning as well. But the Starshot team boasts some top-drawer supporters: In addition to Milner, the board includes British physicist Stephen Hawking and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

During the news briefing, Hawking noted that life on Earth faces risks ranging from asteroid strikes to human-caused catastrophes. “If we are to survive as a species, we must ultimately spread to the stars,” he said.

The project’s executive director is Pete Worden, who previously headed NASA’s Ames Research Center. Today he said he’s already spoken with NASA officials about the plan. “They’re very eager to support us,” he told reporters.

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Look for places where aliens are looking for us

Image: Earth transit
When Earth passes in front of the sun, it blocks a small part of the sun’s light. Potential observers outside our solar system might be able to detect the resulting dimming of the sun and study Earth’s atmosphere. (Credit: Axel Quetz / MPIA / NASA)

The past decade has brought about a revolution in astronomers’ ability to detect potentially habitable planets, and there’s much, much more to come. The problem will be identifying the likeliest places for life to lurk, and two newly published studies address that problem from two dramatically different perspectives.

One study takes an inward-looking perspective: If we were the aliens, how would we know about Earth?

The best planet-detection method that’s currently available to earthly astronomers looks for the telltale dimming of light as a planet crosses the disk of its parent star. But that dimming, known as a planetary transit, can be seen only when the planet and the alien star are lined up with Earth.

That suggests that Earth is most likely to be detected by observers on alien planets in a narrow strip of the sky where our planet can be seen crossing the sun.

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Bad news and good news about the SETI quest

Image: Jill Tarter
SETI pioneer Jill Tarter pays a visit to the Allen Telescope Array in California, one of the prime sites for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. (Credit: SETI Institute)

t’s a question that goes back decades: If other civilizations have arisen beyond Earth over the course of billions of years, why haven’t we heard from them? Two kinds of answers have recently come into the spotlight – one kind that’s disheartening, and another kind that’s challenging.

First, the bad news: Researchers from the Australian National University say climate change could have killed off E.T. and his ilk.

In a paper published last month in the journal Astrobiology, Aditya Chopra and Charles Lineweaver suggest that habitable Earthlike planets eventually fall prey either to runaway global warming, as in the case of Venus; or runaway global cooling, as in the case of Mars.

Their model proposes that if life ever does arise on an alien world, it would go extinct in most cases after just 1.5 billion years of the planet’s existence, without getting past the microbial stage.

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No alien signals heard from anomalous star

Image: Allen Telescope Array
The Allen Telescope Array looks for alien radio signals. (Credit: Seth Shostak / SETI Institute)

The SETI Institute says it hasn’t detected any alien radio signals coming from a star whose light seems to be dimming in a weird way, but it’s too early to determine what kind of phenomenon is behind the pattern.

The star, which is known as KIC 8462852 and lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, has been the focus of otherworldly buzz for the past month due to anomalous observations gathered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler’s data suggested that the star goes dramatically dim on an irregular schedule, at intervals ranging from five to 80 days.

Astronomers said the best natural explanation for the effect appeared to be a swarm of comets that just happened to be passing across the star’s disk when Kepler was looking. But one research team, led by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, speculated that the effect could be caused by an alien megastructure that was being built around the star.

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‘Origins’ concert sets the Big Bang to music

Image: Big Bang
An artist’s conception shows two “branes” colliding in multidimensional space, creating the Big Bang that gave rise to our own universe 13.8 billion years ago. (Animation by Deep Sky Studios)

The Big Bang never looked, or sounded, so good: The piece de resistance for this week’s SpaceFest in Seattle is a symphonic review of 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, from its expansive beginnings to an unpredictable sonic wave of emergent behavior.

Most of the SpaceFest events take place at the Museum of Flight, but the capper is a concert titled “Origins: Life in the Universe,” unfolding at Benaroya Hall at 2 p.m. Saturday.

“The whole focus is to blow people away with the beauty of astronomy,” said scientist-composer Glenna Burmer, one of the prime movers for “Origins.”

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Is it aliens? SETI telescope targets mystery star

Image: Allen Telescope Array
The antennas of the Allen Telescope Array in California is collecting signals from a strange star known as KIC 8462852. (Credit: SETI Institute)

One of the premier telescope arrays in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is focusing its antennas on an anomalously blinking star, thanks in part to speculation that the star called KIC 8462852 could harbor a network of alien megastructures.

The Allen Telescope Array, a complex of 42 radio dishes in Northern California that was funded in part by Seattle billionaire Paul Allen, has been collecting data about the star since Thursday evening, SETI Institute researcher Doug Vakoch said.

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New index sizes up habitability of alien planets

Image: James Webb Space Telescope
NASA’s James Webb Telescope, shown in this artist’s conception, will provide more data about exoplanets. A new habitability index is aimed at helping scientists prioritize the search. (Credit: NASA)

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised a new habitability index for judging how suitable alien planets might be for life, and the top prospects on their list are an Earthlike world called Kepler-442b and a yet-to-be confirmed planet known as KOI 3456.02.

Those worlds both score higher than our own planet on the index: 0.955 for KOI 3456.02 and 0.836 for Kepler-442b, compared with 0.829 for Earth and 0.422 for Mars. The point of the exercise is to help scientists prioritize future targets for close-ups from NASA’s yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments.

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Dark Martian streaks linked to liquid water

Image: Recurring slope lineae
Scientists say these dark streaks, shown flowing downhill in a false-color image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, were formed by flowing water. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona)

For years, scientists have puzzled over dark streaks that appear and disappear on the surface of Mars – and now they’re confident enough to assert that the streaks are caused by trickles of salty water.

Their findings, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, serve as the best evidence yet that liquid water still occasionally flows on the Red Planet. The research is likely to spark a new wave of speculation about life on Mars – but it’s not likely to justify the breathless reports that circulated in advance of the study’s release.

“Has NASA found life on Mars?” one headline asked over the weekend. The short answer is no. Nevertheless, NASA thought enough of the study to call it a “major science finding” and schedule a news briefing about it.

John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, said the results make it “even more imperative that we send astrobiologists and planetary scientists to Mars, to explore the question, ‘Is there current life on Mars?’” NASA’s long-range plan calls for astronauts to start visiting Mars and its moons in the 2030s.

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