Earlier this week, the two men who detected the first planet outside our solar system that circled a sun-like star won a Nobel Prize in physics. The discovery heralded the beginning of the exoplanet era -- replacing a centuries-old scientific supposition that planets orbited other stars with scientific fact. The two men are Michel Mayor, …
Continue reading "The Remarkable Race to Find the First Exoplanet, And the Nobel Prize It Produced"
Seldom does one rock outcrop get so many visitors in a day, especially when that outcrop is located in rugged, frigid terrain abutting the Greenland Ice Sheet and can be reached only by helicopter. But this has been a specimen of great importance and notoriety since it appeared from beneath the snow pack some eight …
Continue reading "On The Frontier Of The Hunt For Signs Of Life On Early Earth And Ancient Mars"
Paleontology has for centuries worked to understand the distant past by digging up fossilized remains and analyzing how and why they fit into the evolutionary picture. The results have been impressive. But they have been limited. The evolutionary picture painted relies largely on the discovery of once hard-bodied organisms, with a smattering of iconic finds …
Continue reading "Exploring Early Earth by Using DNA As A Fossil"
Biosignatures -- evidence that says or suggests that life has once been present -- are often very hard to find and interpret. Scientists examining fossilized life on Earth can generally reach some sort of agreement about what is before them, but what about the soft-bodied or even single-celled organisms that were the sum total of …
Continue reading "“Agnostic Biosignatures,” And The Path To Life As We Don’t Know It"
The newest space telescope in the sky -- NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS -- has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name. The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from …
Continue reading "Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS"
This is Apollo memory month, when the 50th anniversary arrives of the first landing of astronauts on the moon. It was a very big deal and certainly deserves attention and applause. But there's something unsettling about the anniversary as well, a sense that the human exploration side of NASA's mission has disappointed and that its …
Continue reading "Curiosity Rover as Seen From High Above by Mars Orbiter"
The presence -- and absence -- of methane gas on Mars has been both very intriguing and very confusing for years. And news coming out last week and then on Monday adds to this scientific mystery. To the great surprise of the Curiosity rover team, their Sample Analysis on Mars instrument sent back a measurement …
Continue reading "Methane on Mars. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow"
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”"
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"
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 …
Many Worlds 