Showing posts with label Sara Seager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sara Seager. Show all posts

Friday, August 22, 2014

An Astrophysicist On The Hunt For Aliens

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Sara Seager An Astrophysicist in Search of E.T.

By online.wsj.com
8-21-14
Sara Seager of MIT thinks we could be able to detect life on other planets in just 20 years

      Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is on the hunt for aliens. She thinks we might be able to find them within the next 20 years. In a new report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she argues that we may soon have the capability to detect life on other planets, a realization she calls "The Awakening."

She admits that she's excited. "Sometimes the anticipation of something rivals the actual discovery," she says in an energetic staccato in her office overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge. "Just the excitement that we can actually do it is phenomenal."

But she doesn't think we'll be chatting with extraterrestrials any time soon, and carefully qualifies her predictions. Those alien life-forms would need to be relatively close to our solar system, she says, and would need to fit particular criteria. "If there's some weird type of underground life, or if life is like a computer that doesn't give off a gas, we're not going to see it," she concedes. What we will detect, she says, with the help of improved telescopes and devices, is the gas that life as we know it emits.

Prof. Seager, 43, thinks there's something out there, "just by the sheer numbers of planets," she says. "Every astronomer knows that every star out there has at least one planet, and we have over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and upward of hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe." . . .

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Drake Equation for Alien Life Has Been Revised | VIDEO


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Exoplanet

The Drake Equation Revisited: Interview with Planet Hunter Sara Seager

By Devin Powell
Astrobiology Magazine / www.space.com
9-4-13


". . . two inhabited planets could reasonably turn up during the next decade"

      Planet hunters keep finding distant worlds that bear a resemblance to Earth. Some of the thousands of exoplanet candidates discovered to date have similar sizes or temperatures. Others possess rocky surfaces and support atmospheres. But no world has yet provided an unambiguous sign of the characteristic that still sets our pale blue dot apart: the presence of life.

That may be about to change, says exoplanet expert Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Upcoming NASA missions such as the Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS) and the James Webb Space Telescope, both due to launch around 2018, should be able to find and characterize Earth-like planets orbiting small stars.

Spotting signs of life on those planets will be possible because of progress in detecting not only planets, but their atmospheres as well. When a planet passes in front of its host star, atmospheric gases reveal their presence by absorbing some of the starlight. Oxygen, water vapor or other gases that do not belong on dead worlds could very well provide the first evidence of life elsewhere. . . .

Friday, September 06, 2013

The New Equation for Estimating Alien Life Across the Universe


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The New Equation for Estimating Alien Life Across the Universe


By Stuart Clark
www.theguardian.com
9-4-13

      How many other inhabited planets are there? It's a question that fascinates scientists and lay people alike. A new equation may help weigh up the possibility.

Many of us have glanced upwards at the stars and wondered whether there is other life out there somewhere. Few, however, have then tried to write down an equation to express the probability in numbers.

Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has done just that. Her equation collects together all the factors that could determine how many planets with detectable signs of life may be discovered in the coming years.

The factors include the number of stars that will be observed, the fraction of those stars with habitable planets, and the fraction of those planets that can be observed. First presented at a conference earlier this year, the equation is written as N = N*FQFHZFOFLFS. It was published yesterday in the online Astrobiology magazine.

This is not the first time an astronomer has put such thoughts into numbers, as Seager acknowledges. Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake gave a lecture about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To set the agenda, he wrote down a list of the factors needed to estimate the number of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. . . .