Tag: Astrobiology
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Scientists look for new ways to track the technosignatures of alien civilizations
An artist’s conception shows a crumbling megastructure known as a Dyson sphere orbiting a distant star. Could such structures produce detectable technosignatures? (Danielle Futselaar Illustration) Could extraterrestrial civilizations leave their fingerprints as chlorofluorocarbons in planetary atmospheres, or the waste heat generated by industrial processes, or artificial bursts of neutrinos or gravitational waves? That’s what a…
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Could Barnard’s Star harbor an icy home for life? Astronomers weigh the options
An artist’s conception shows three planets around a red dwarf star. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration) Where’s the nearest exoplanet with conditions that are right for life? Over the past couple of years, astrobiologists have talked up Proxima Centauri b, which is sitting just 4.2 light-years away. But Villanova University astrophysicist Edward Guinan favors a world…
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Hubble team has bad news for aliens: Red dwarfs seem to wipe out life’s necessities
An artist’s conception shows the red dwarf star AU Microscopii with a hypothetical planet and moon in the foreground. (NASA / ESA Illustration / G. Bacon) Red dwarf stars have been seen as the biggest potential frontier for alien life, in part because they’re the most common stars in our galaxy. But observations made using…
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Experts urge NASA to build huge new space telescope to look at alien Earths
An artist’s conception shows a planet-hunting space telescope accompanied by an umbrella-like starshade that blocks the glare of the planet’s parent star. (NASA / JPL Illustration) NASA should add a large, technologically advanced space telescope to its lineup to capture direct images of Earthlike planets beyond our solar system, astronomers say in a congressionally mandated…
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Mars Express delivers radar evidence of hidden lake at Red Planet’s south pole
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, shown in this artist’s conception, has been circling Mars since 2003. (Spacecraft image credit: ESA / ATG Medialab; Mars: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) Radar readings from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter point to the location of what appears to be…
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Scientists come up with revised ‘Rio scale’ to rate claims of extraterrestrial contact
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) For almost 60 years, efforts to pick up signs of extraterrestrial civilizations have yielded a big fat zero, but there have been plenty of false alarms to…
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Life on the moon? It could have happened billions of years ago, astrobiologists say
The moon passes right across Earth’s disk in a 2015 image captured by the DSCOVR satellite from its observation point, a million miles out in space. (NASA / NOAA Photo) The moon is one of the last places in the solar system you’d expect to find life today, but astrobiologists say life could have found…
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NASA’s Curiosity rover tracks down organic molecules and methane on Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover snaps a self-portrait on Mars’ Vera Rubin Ridge in February. The rover used a camera mounted on its robotic arm to take the pictures that went into this mosaic. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS Photo) The latest evidence for methane and other organic chemicals on Mars isn’t the smoking gun for life…
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How do we get our message across to the extraterrestrials? The answers are evolving
Astronomers and artists sent a binary-coded radio transmission in the direction of an extrasolar planet known as GJ273 b in 2017. (METI International Illustration / Danielle Futselaar) LOS ANGELES — Last year, scientists sent a binary-coded message telling the aliens what time it was. Next year, it’ll be the periodic table of the elements. And…
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Water plumes on Europa detected by Galileo spacecraft
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist’s illustration of the Galileo spacecraft, Europa and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Michigan A review of data captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft as it orbited Jupiter in the 1990s indicates it likely flew through a plume of water vapor spewing from cracks in the surface of the moon…