For years now, finding planets in the habitable zones of their host stars has been a global astrophysical quest and something of a holy grail. That distance from a star where temperatures could allow H20 to remain liquid some of the time has been deemed the "Goldilocks" zone where life could potentially emerge and …
Continue reading "Exoplanets With Complex Life May Be Very Rare, Even in Their “Habitable Zones”"
Four years ago, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition to give popular names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets that orbit them. The event encouraged 570,000 people to vote and the iconic planet 51 Pegasi b became "Dimidium, " 55 Cancri b became "Galileo," and (among others) Formalhaut b became "Dagon." It remains unclear …
Continue reading "A Grand Global Competition to Name 100 ExoWorlds"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4jfPfMKBgU&feature=youtu.be Sometimes relics from the past help put the present into better focus. Recovered footage of a 1900 total eclipse of the sun -- believed to be the first captured -- has been scanned, restored and then reassembled and retimed frame by frame to create a memorable and kind of spooky look at early …
Continue reading "A Magical Solar Eclipse From 1900, Recovered and Instructive"
Ethiopia's Dallol volcano and hot springs have created an environment about as hostile to life as can be imagined. Temperatures in the supersaturated water reach more than 200 degrees F (94 C) and are reported to approach pure acidity, with an extraordinarily low pH of 0.25. The environment is also highly salty, with salt chimneys …
Continue reading "The Message of Really, Really Extreme Life"
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system. With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search …
I regret that I haven't been able to file Many Worlds posts for a while, but here is why: The broken part of my wife's ankle is the traingle of bone floating near the tibia, to which it should be attached. She's had surgery and isn't supposed to be walking on it for a …
The Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the jewel in the crown of NASA's science missions, was launched 29 years ago. It has been providing scientists and the public with a steady stream of previously unimagined insights about the cosmos -- plus those jaw-dropping, very high-resolution images like the one above -- pretty much ever since. It …
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
When Buzz Aldrin became the second man to ever walk on the moon, his lunar escapades, along with those of Neil Armstrong, were a cause of national and pretty much global joy, wonder and pride. That the mission was hazardous was self-evident -- from launch to the ad-lib and hair-raising landing on the moon, …
The question of whether simple life can survive in space is hardly new, but it has lately taken on a new urgency. It is not only a pressing scientific question -- might life from Mars or another body have seeded life on Earth? Might organisms similar to extreme Earth life survive Mars-like conditions? -- but …
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