pale blue dot
NASA announced a new citizen science project called “Planet Patrol” which lets the volunteers help to find exoplanets using TESS Space Telescope (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data. It is similar to another NASA citizen science project, “Backyard Worlds”, where volunteers or the “citizen scientists” are checking telescope images the same way the American astronomer Clyde …
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Back in 2018, using the onboard radar instrument MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding), European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter discovered an underground reservoir that is buried about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) under the ice. Now, in September 2020, scientists analyzing Mars Express data have discovered three more subglacial lakes on Mars …
Continue reading “Subglacial lakes on Mars: an oasis for life?”
Life on Venus? Astronomers have detected the first sign of life in the deadly clouds of Venus. They found phosphine which displays a strong signature of life. If we can detect life itself soon, this might be the most exciting news in history.
On June 25, Friday, SETI Institute CEO Bill Diamond held an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the popular social news aggregation and web content rating website Reddit. Here are some interesting questions and Bill Diamond’s answer to them.
It astonishes me how much we seem to know about aliens. They build technology-driven civilisations and pilot spaceships across the galaxy. They create energy-harvesting structures around their stars. They beam interstellar greetings to us. We cannot be sure that, when our own broadcasts reach them in some future era, they will breathlessly await the arrival …
Continue reading “Why our imagination for alien life is so impoverished”
A new Earth-sized planet named Kepler-1649c orbiting its star in the habitable zone has been detected by a team of scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, NASA has announced.
Exciting news! NASA’s planet-hunter TESS Space Telescope (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has discovered its first Earth-sized exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone. The discovery was announced by NASA on January 7, 2020. The planet is named “TOI 700 d”. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers confirmed the discovery and have modeled the planet’s potential environments …
Earth’s atmosphere is leaking: around 90 tonnes of material escapes and streams out into space from our planet’s upper atmosphere every single day. To understand this escape, NASA launches rockets into space. The space agency also sends scientists to a tiny Arctic town named Ny-Ålesund (English: New Alesund) on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, …
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Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely – or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations – not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and …
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Elizabeth Tasker (@girlandkat on Twitter), the UK astrophysicist working at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the author of the popular science book “The Planet Factory” (see notes 1) says “the habitable zone is the worst name ever in the history of naming anything” in her perfect doodly she published on Twitter.
