NASA should begin developing a mission that can tell us whether life in the near galaxy is abundant, rare or essentially absent, The National Academy of Sciences recommended yesterday. The call for a next Grand Observatory telescope with this ambitious goal represents the first time that the Academy, in its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and …
A Call To Action on Ensuring That Extraordinary Claims About ET Life Come With Extraordinary Evidence
The global scientific search for signs of life beyond Earth has produced cutting-edge and paradigm-shifting science for several decades now, and it has clearly found eager audiences around the world. This search is a high-priority goal of NASA and other space agencies, as well as institutions, universities and companies. While the successes in this broadly …
Many Planets Form in a Soup of Life-Friendly Organic Compounds
One of the more persuasive arguments in favor of the potential existence of life beyond Earth is that the well-known chemical building blocks of that life are found throughout the galaxy. These chemical components aren't all present in all examined solar systems and planets, but they are common and behave in ways familiar to scientists …
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Frigid Europa Holds a Huge and Maybe Habitable Ocean Beneath Its Thick Ice Covering. How is That Possible?
Jupiter's moon Europa is almost five times as far away from the sun as Earth is, with surface temperatures that don't rise above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. It's slightly smaller than our moon and orbits but 400,000 miles from the solar system's largest planet, which it takes but 3.5 Earth days to orbit. As a …
Sample Return from Mars Begins in Earnest
For the first time ever, a sample of pulverized rock from another planet has been drilled, collected and stored for eventual delivery to the highest-tech labs on Earth. Yes, a storehouse of rocks were collected on the moon by Apollo astronauts and delivered to Houston, and some small samples of two asteroids and one comet …
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Introducing Hycean Planets
Planets beyond our solar system, we now know, come in all shapes, sizes and consistencies. There are rocky planets, water worlds, gaseous planets, super-Earths, hot Jupiters, tidally locked planets, planets in orbital resonance with each other, and so much more. A group of exoplanet researchers at the University of Cambridge have recently proposed a new …
Findings Suggest that Red Dwarf Stars May Not Sterilize As Many Exoplanets As Feared
Red dwarf suns are the most common in the universe, and many of the exoplanets officially discovered so far orbit this type of "cool" star. Red dwarfs are much smaller and less powerful than the G type stars such as our own sun, and it is easier to detect exoplanets orbiting them because of their …
The Many Ways The James Webb Space Telescope Could Fail
When a damaged Apollo 13 and its crew were careening to Earth, mission control director Gene Kranz famously told the assembled NASA team that "failure is not an option." Actually, the actor playing Kranz in the "Apollo 13" movie spoke those words, but by all accounts Kranz and his team lived that phrase, with a …
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Earth as a Transiting Exoplanet
Exoplanet scientists and enthusiasts spend a lot of time trying to find, measure and understand distant planets that can -- under specific conditions -- be detected as passing in front of their host star. A majority of the 4000-plus exoplanets discovered so far were indirectly detected this way, by measuring the diminishing of stellar light …
Will The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) — Or Something Like It — Emerge As NASA’s Next Great Observatory?
Some time later this summer, it is predicted, the National Academy of Sciences will release its long-awaited Decadal Survey for astrophysics, which is expected to recommend the science and architecture that NASA should embrace for its next "Great Observatory." Many Worlds earlier featured one of the four concepts in the running -- LUVOIR or the …
Many Worlds 