Will 2020 Be the Year We Find Intelligent Alien Life?

In the past three decades, scientists have found more than 4,000 exoplanets. And the discoveries will keep rolling in; observations suggest that every star in the Milky Way galaxy hosts more than one planet on average.

By Leonard David www.space.com 11-26-19

Given a convergence of ground- and space-based capability, artificial intelligence/machine learning research and other tools, are we on the verge of identifying what is universally possible for life — or perhaps even confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence?

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'Astrocomb' to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Scientists develop astrocomb, a tool that will find Earth-like planets, alien life

Scientists have developed an astrocomb, a tool that precisely measures frequencies or colours of light, which can help widen the search for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life.

By The Week 2-21-19

The custom-made frequency comb, developed by researchers from National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) in the US, provides the precision needed for discovering and characterising planets orbiting M dwarf stars, which comprise 70 per cent of the stars in the galaxy and are plentiful near Earth.

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Phoning E.T.: Message Sent to Nearby Planet That Could Host Life

Artist’s illustration of the GJ 273 system, which consists of a red dwarf star and two known planets, one of which may be capable of supporting life.
Credit: Danielle Futselaar/METI

If there are any intelligent aliens in the GJ 273 system, they can expect to hear from us about a dozen years from now. Last month, scientists and artists beamed a message to GJ 273, a red

By Mike Wall Space.com 11-16-17

dwarf also known as Luyten's star that lies 12.36 light-years from Earth, project team members revealed today (Nov. 16). Luyten's star hosts two known planets, one of which, GJ 273b, may be capable of supporting life as we know it.

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Exomoons May Support Life

The discovery of an exomoon could be years away, but researchers are already theorizing the conditions under which liquid water might be found on their surfaces.

By Elizabeth Howell www.seeker.com 3-27-17

As some scientists search for habitable planets outside our solar system, other researchers are tackling a similar question for the moons of these planets. So-called exomoons have yet to be found outside our solar system, and a detection could be a decade away - or more.

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New Search for Alien Life with Deep-Space Observatory

The European Space Agency’s Science Programme Committee has approved the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission to move into the construction phase. They aim to launch this deep-space observatory in 2026 with the goal of “discovering and

By Tom Ward futurism.com 7-4-17

characterizing Earth-sized planets and super-Earths orbiting Sun-like stars in the habitable zone” — although it “could eventually lead to the detection of extraterrestrial life,” according to a University of Warwick press release.

The observatory will have 26 telescopes on board and will be launched 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) into space, where, according to a mission summary, it will conduct “Ultra-high precision, long (up to several years), uninterrupted photometric monitoring in the visible band of very large samples of bright (mV ≤11) stars.” This will provide unprecedented data on distant planets.

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More Alien Worlds! NASA to Announce

NASA will announce the latest crop of planet discoveries from the Kepler Space Telescope during a briefing Monday morning (June 19). The briefing will be at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) during the Kepler

BY Jesse Emspak Space.com 6-18-17

Science Conference at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. You can watch the exoplanet announcement here, courtesy of NASA TV. NASA will livestream the conference here: http://www.nasa.gov/live.

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Nearly 2,000 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but this just might be the strangest one yet.

Ed Mazza The Huffington Post 3-31-16

A lava-loaded “super earth” called 55 Cancri e is twice the size of our own planet but eight times as dense. And it’s so close to its star that a year lasts only 18 hours.

Just 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e may also be tidally locked to its sun the way the moon is to Earth. One side would be a blazing hot eternal night with temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other an even hotter permanent day, according to a heat map of the planet published in the journal Nature that used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

“The day side could possibly have rivers of lava and big pools of extremely hot magma, but we think the night side would have solidified lava flows like those found in Hawaii,” Michael Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a news release. [...]

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The Aliens Are Silent Because They Are All Extinct

By www.anu.edu.aul
1-21-16

      Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, say astrobiologists from ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

"The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra, lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology.

"Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive." [...]

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NASA Confirms 100 New Alien Planets

By Nadia Drake
news.nationalgeographic.com
1-8-16

The revamped Kepler mission is raking in the discoveries, turning up new kinds of worlds.

     

After being crippled by a mechanical malfunction, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft is back in action and has found a slew of planets orbiting other stars.

Called K2, the revamped mission has already found more than 100 confirmed planets, the University of Arizona’s Ian Crossfield announced Tuesday at a conference of the American Astronomical Society. Some of these are very different from what the spacecraft observed during its original mission; many are in multi-planet systems and orbit stars that are brighter and hotter than the stars in the original Kepler field.

It has found a system with three planets that are bigger than Earth, spotted a planet in the Hyades star cluster—the nearest open star cluster to Earth—and discovered a planet being ripped apart as it orbits a white dwarf star.

Scientists have also found 234 possible planets that are awaiting confirmation, said Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.[...]

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Scientists Figured Out Where Aliens Might Be Hiding

By Max Plenke
mic.com
1-7-15

     At the edges of our galaxy, 100,000 light-years away, massive, dense clusters of stars glom together like a humongous interstellar house party. This is where, according to astrophysicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, we might find intelligent alien life.

The CFA's lead author, Rosanne DiStefano made this hypothesis at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, and — believe it or not — her logic checks out.

Let's say finding intelligent life is a hypothetical one-in-a-million chance. By the center's estimation, there are 150 globular clusters in our Milky Way galaxy, each holding roughly a million stars per 100 million light years. Plus, they're old — like, 10 billion years old — and stable, meaning they didn't get nailed by cataclysmic, planet-destroying gamma-ray bursts.

It could be that these globular clusters are full of planets twice as old as our own, that had billions more years to develop. The Fermi paradox, a theory of why alien life hasn't found us yet, refers to these clusters as Planet X. [...]

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Is That Really Alien Life?

An artist's concept of a planetary lineup, featuring five exoplanets that may be similar to Earth: (L to R) Kepler-22b, Kepler-69c, Kepler-452b, Kepler-62f and Kepler-186f, with Earth on the far right. With more advanced telescopes, scientists may be able to find signs of life on exoplanets like these.

By Calla Cofield
Space.com
8-3-15

      The search for life elsewhere in the universe is on the cusp of a new era: When scientists will have the opportunity to study the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets with future, technologically advanced telescopes. Humans have no foreseeable way to travel to these worlds to study them up close, but the chemical mixtures that surround them may reveal the presence of life.

There is no single "smoking gun" for life; no atmospheric mixture that can definitively declare, "Something lives here!" (At least, not that scientists know of). And searching for life from afar carries a heavy burden of proof: Any signal that looks like life could actually be created in some clever, non-biological process that scientists haven't yet thought of.

So, in addition to coming up with ideas for what life might look like on alien planets, scientists must also come up with ways that non-living processes could create those same signatures. Scientists are now working hard to think up new examples of these "false positives," in an effort to avoid a misstep when the data start to appear. . . .

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NASA's Hunt for Alien Life Taken To Next Level

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By Ed Mazza
The Huffington Post
4-23-15

     NASA is taking the hunt for life on other worlds to the next level.

The space agency has assembled a team of experts from across scientific fields at some of the nation's leading universities and research institutes to see if any of the more than 1,000 planets discovered outside our solar system may be habitable.

The initiative is called Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), and it brings together earth scientists, planetary scientists, heliophysicists and astrophysicists.

“This interdisciplinary endeavor connects top research teams and provides a synthesized approach in the search for planets with the greatest potential for signs of life,” Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science, said in a news release. “The hunt for exoplanets is not only a priority for astronomers, it’s of keen interest to planetary and climate scientists as well.”

The move comes just weeks after NASA's top scientist predicted that mankind will soon find indications of life outside of Earth. . . .

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Detection of Light Bouncing Off An Exoplanet—A First!

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By Joseph Stromberg
vox.com
4-23-15

it could help us identify which planets
are habitable — and may contain life

      A team of Portuguese astronomers has detected light bouncing directly off the surface of an exoplanet for the first time.

Why is this a big deal? Studying the light reflecting from exoplanets can give us clues about the gases present in that planet's atmosphere. That could help researchers identify which planets are habitable and may contain life.

Until now, we've discovered about 1,900 exoplanets, but we've only seen the vast majority of them indirectly — most often by noticing when they pass in front of their stars, causing a momentary dip in light. In a few cases, we've also detected tiny amounts of starlight passing through planets' atmospheres at the same time.

This new technique, looking at light reflecting off of planets directly, could open up a much bigger range of distant planets' atmospheres for study in future years — especially if it's employed by the next generation of even bigger telescopes currently under construction. . . .

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5 Ancient Alien Planets Found

By Mike Wall
Space.com
1-27-15

      Five rocky alien worlds that are 80 percent as old as the universe itself have been discovered, suggesting that Earth-size planets have been a feature of the Milky Way galaxy almost since its beginning.

The new found exoplanets circle Kepler-444, an 11.2-billion-year-old star about 25 percent smaller than the sun that lies 117 light-years from Earth. All of the worlds are Venus-size or smaller and are therefore rocky, though scientists know nothing else about their composition.

All five alien planets complete an orbit in less than 10 days, meaning they're almost certainly too hot to support life as we know it. But Kepler-444 hints at the existence of other ancient planetary systems that may be more hospitable, researchers said. . . .

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Searching for Alien Planets with New Telescope in Chile | VIDEO

By Miriam Kramer
space.com
1-19-15

      A new alien-planet–hunting telescope has just come online in Chile, and it could help scientists peer into the atmospheres of relatively small planets circling nearby stars.

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS for short) — located at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Paranal Observatory — is designed to seek out planets two to eight times the diameter of Earth as they pass in front of their stars. Such a planet will cause the light of the star to dip ever so slightly when passing in front of it, allowing the telescope to detect the planet during its transit.

"We are excited to begin our search for small planets around nearby stars," Peter Wheatley, an NGTS project lead from the University of Warwick, U.K., said in as statement. "The NGTS discoveries, and follow-up observations by telescopes on the ground and in space, will be important steps in our quest to study the atmospheres and composition of small planets such as the Earth." . . .

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1,000th Alien Planet Discovered by NASA's Kepler Spacecraft | VIDEO

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By Mike Wall
Space.com
1-6-14

      NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered its 1,000th alien planet, further cementing the prolific exoplanet-hunting mission's status as a space-science legend.

Kepler reached the milestone today (Jan. 6) with the announcement of eight newly confirmed exoplanets, bringing the mission's current alien world tally to 1,004. Kepler has found more than half of all known exoplanets to date, and the numbers will keep rolling in: The telescope has also spotted 3,200 additional planet candidates, and about 90 percent of them should end up being confirmed, mission scientists say.

Furthermore, a number of these future finds are likely to be small, rocky worlds with temperate, relatively hospitable surface conditions — in other worlds, planets a lot like Earth. (In fact, at least two of the newly confirmed eight Kepler planets — which were announced in Seattle today during the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society — appear to meet that description, mission team members said.)

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Sniffing Out Alien Life: Stinky Chemicals May Be Key

By Mike Wall
space.com
8-2-14

      If Professor Hubert Farnsworth's "Smell-O-Scope" actually existed, astrobiologists would have pointed it at dozens of alien planets by now.

The Professor's odor-detecting invention, which was featured in several episodes of the animated sci-fi series "Futurama," would be a good life-hunting tool, researchers say, because alien organisms may betray their presence by pumping stinky chemicals into their home planets' skies.

"I joke often that maybe you want to smell for life on other planets instead of look for it with a telescope," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said last month during a NASA panel discussion about ancient Earth and habitable exoplanets.

Hunting for biosignatures

Domagal-Goldman and other researchers spend a lot of time thinking about the best biosignatures, or signs of life, to look for in the atmospheres of faraway planets.

Two good candidates are oxygen and methane, both of which disappear from atmospheres without replenishment. While each substance can be created by geological as well as biological processes, detecting both oxygen and methane in an exoplanet's skies simultaneously would be strongly suggestive of alien life, many scientists say. . . .

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Scientists Searching For Alien Air Pollution

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By Geoff Brumfiel
www.npr.org
8-22-14

     Air pollution is clogging the skies of our planet. Now one scientist thinks Earth may be just one of many polluted worlds — and that searching for extraterrestrial smog may actually be a good way to search for alien intelligence.

"People refer to 'little green men,' but ETs that are detected by this method should not be labeled as green," says Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University.

The idea of finding alien polluters may be a bit of a long shot, but Loeb says it's possible.

Astronomers have been able to glimpse the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system for a while now. In 2018, NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be larger and better than ever at looking at extrasolar atmospheres.

"The idea would be that when a planet like the Earth is passing in front of its host star, a small fraction of the light from the star would pass through the atmosphere and show potentially evidence for these pollutants," he says. . . .

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New Scientific Breakthroughs Continue with Hubble Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope still pushing the frontiers of astronomy

By William Harwood
CBS News
8-1-14

      Nearly a quarter of a century after its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope is still pushing the frontiers of observational astronomy, thanks to the sensitivity of its instruments, the ultra precise way the observatory can be controlled and ingenious new techniques that are allowing astronomers to peer deeper into the cosmos than ever before.

"That's why the Hubble is still so exciting," said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "We're learning more and more about how to use it even better and better, whether it's looking for exoplanet atmospheres, measuring dark energy to a precision we never thought possible or using gravitational lenses to push Hubble to look even further back in time."

In recent observations, Hubble has been used to search for dim, difficult-to-detect minor planets beyond the orbit of Pluto, possible candidates for a flyby after the New Horizons probe streaks past Pluto in 2015. Hubble has monitored Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which appears to be shrinking, and a comet -- Sliding Spring -- that will make a close flyby of Mars in October.

But it's Hubble's ability to capture light from galaxies shining when the universe was a fraction of its present age that continues to intrigue scientists and the public alike, providing a glimpse into the depths of cosmic history. . . .

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“Alien Life May Only Be Found On Worlds Possessing Oceans…”

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Oceans needed for alien life? Study says look for water on other worlds

By James Maynard
Tech Times
7-22-14

     Alien life may only be found on worlds possessing oceans of water, a new computer study concludes. These large bodies of water could also provide astronomers with a way to find living worlds beyond our solar system.

The virtual models showed how large oceans moderate global temperatures and conditions. On Earth, seasons would come on much faster, with greater extremes of temperatures, without its large quantity of water. Life is more likely to exist on similar planets, the models showed.
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Astronomers are trying to find as many planets as they can within the "habitable zone" around other stars. However, the simulations showed that without large bodies of water, life on another world would likely be quickly wiped out by extreme temperatures. . . .

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