In a solar system far, far away, life of some sort is just waiting to be found. Or so the world of astrobiology sure hopes it is. The new player in the astrobiology world, now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is planned to launch in the 2040s if all goes well. While it's possible …
Continue reading "Preparing For The Habitable Worlds Observatory, Our Best Shot at Finding ET Life"
Beware easy answers to the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Be they "alien" skeletons in Mexico City, interstellar probes that briefly pass through our solar system, UFOs of all sorts and claims to have found "biosignature" chemical byproducts of life around planets where many other factors say that life cannot exist -- their …
Continue reading "A Real ET Discovery With Promise, Amid Some Other Quite Questionable Claims"
In our Earthling minds, planets exist in solar systems with a Sun in the middle and objects large and small orbiting around it. This is hardly surprising since planets are pretty much exclusively illustrated in solar systems and, until the onset of the 21st century, no other kind of planet had been identified. That changed …
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began decades ago as an effort to pick up radio signals from distant civilizations. The effort was centered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and was by today's standards quite rudimentary. A much broader search for distant radio signals remains very much at the core of SETI …
Among the most eagerly awaited results from the early observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is whether or not the seven rocky planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system have atmospheres. The TRAPPIST-1 planets are close to us (40 light-years away), are all solid rather than gaseous, and they orbit a cool and small sun …
Jupiter is often described as the "big brother" planet of our solar system that made the formation and evolution of Earth possible. In the early days of the solar system, massive Jupiter helped the planet grow rapidly while serving as a gravity well that shielded the planet from the most violent planetesimal, asteroid and debris …
Theories abound on how Earth got its water. Most widely embraced is that asteroids, and maybe comets, crashed into our planet and released the water they held -- in the form of ice or hydrated minerals in their crystal structures -- and over time water became our oceans. The inflow was especially intense during what …
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The James Webb Space Telescope is beginning to reveal previously unknowable facts about the composition of exoplanets -- about the presence or absence of atmospheres around the exoplanets and the makeup of any atmospheres that are detected. The results have been coming in for some months and they are a delight to scientists. And as …
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Before the first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s, our own solar system served as the model for what solar systems looked like. The physical and chemical dynamics that formed our system were also seen as the default model for what might have occurred in solar systems yet to be found. As the number of …
In the search for life on distant planets, scientists generally focus on identifying Earth-sized, rocky planets, finding planets in their host star's habitable zone, and having available the telescope power to read the chemical make-up of the atmospheres. A relatively small number of Earth-sized exoplanets discovered by telescopes in space and on Earth have meet …
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Many Worlds 