In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, renowned physicist Enrico Fermi was lunching with colleagues including Edward Teller, Herbert York an Emil Konopinski. The group talked and laughed about a spate of recent UFO reports during the meal, as well as a cartoon about who might be stealing garbage can tops. Was it …
A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable
Now on Facebook: http://facebook.com/nexssmanyworlds/ The era of directly imaging exoplanets has only just begun, but the science and viewing pleasures to come are appealingly apparent. This evocative movie of four planets more massive than Jupiter orbiting the young star HR 8799 is a composite of sorts, including images taken over seven years at the W.M. …
Continue reading "A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable"
Messy Chemistry, Evolving Rocks, and the Origin of Life
Noted synthetic life researcher Steven Benner of Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is fond of pointing out that gooey tars are the end product of too many experiments in his field. His widely-held view is that the tars, made out of chemicals known to be important in the origin of life, are nonetheless a dead …
Continue reading "Messy Chemistry, Evolving Rocks, and the Origin of Life"
Direct Imaging Earth and Moon from Mars
Sometimes images arrive that make it clear that the space age is not a throw-away line, but a reality. This one was taken by a satellite orbiting Mars, and it shows the Earth and the moon. Kind of remarkable, given that the camera -- the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars …
Some Spectacular Images (And Science) From The Year Past
This is a golden era for space and planetary science, a time when discoveries, new understandings, and newly-found mysteries are flooding in. There are so many reasons to find the drama intriguing: a desire to understand the physical forces at play, to learn how those forces led to the formation of Earth and ultimately us, …
Continue reading "Some Spectacular Images (And Science) From The Year Past"
Curiosity Has Found The Element Boron On Mars. That's More Important Than You Might Think
For years, noted chemist and synthetic life researcher Steven Benner has talked about the necessary role of the element boron in the origin of life. Without boron, he has found, many of the building blocks needed to form the earliest self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) fall apart when they come into contact with water, which is …
The Search for Organic Compounds On Mars Is Getting Results
One of the primary goals of the Curiosity mission to Mars has been to search for and hopefully identify organic compounds -- the carbon-based molecules that on Earth are the building blocks of life. No previous mission had quite the instruments and capacity needed to detect the precious organics, nor did they have the …
Continue reading "The Search for Organic Compounds On Mars Is Getting Results"
The Stellar Side of The Exoplanet Story
When it comes to the study of exoplanets, it's common knowledge that the host stars don't get much respect. Yes, everyone knows that there wouldn't be exoplanets without stars, and that they serve as the essential background for exoplanet transit observations and as the wobbling object that allows for radial velocity measurements that lead to …
SETI Reconceived and Broadened; A Call for Community Proposals
Earlier this summer, Natalie Cabrol, the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, described a new direction for her organization in Astrobiology Magazine, and I wrote a Many World column about the changes to come. Cabrol's Alien Mindscapes – Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" laid out a plan for the new …
Continue reading "SETI Reconceived and Broadened; A Call for Community Proposals"
Waiting on Enceladus
Of all the possible life-beyond-Earth questions hanging fire, few are quite so intriguing as those surrounding the now famous plumes of the moon Enceladus: what telltale molecules are in the constantly escaping jets of water vapor, and what dynamics inside the moon are pushing them out? Seldom, if ever before, have scientists been given such …
Many Worlds 