The surface of the sun, with each "kernel" or "cell" roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun's atmosphere, or corona) and …
Continue reading "Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability"
It has been almost 60 years now that scientists -- a first a few intrepid souls and now many more -- have been searching the skies for radio signals that just might be coming from other advanced, technological civilizations. There have been some intriguing anomalies that created great interest, but nothing has to date survived …
https://videopress.com/v/lEFuz7Sl?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmanyworlds.space%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F01%2FScreenshot-2020-01-27-at-22.42.43.png&preloadContent=metadata Explainer video for Earth-Like. (Vimeo edition with subtitles here) Are we alone? The question hangs over each discovery of an Earth-sized planet as we speculate on its habitability. But how different and varied could these worlds really be? Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of this potential diversity is to build a …
Continue reading "Exactly How Like Our Earth is an Earth-like Planet?"
When especially interesting new planets are discovered in the cosmos, scientists around the world begin the process of identifying their characteristics -- their orbit, their mass and density, their composition, their thermal properties and much more. It's all part of a drive that seems to be innate in humans to learn about the workings of …
When the the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, it featured the now-iconic two-sun, "circumbinary" planet Tatooine. At that time astronomers didn't really know if such solar systems existed, with more than one sun and at least one planet. Indeed, the first extra-solar planet wasn't detected until the early 1990s. And the first …
Anthony Del Genio started out his career expecting to become first an engineer and then a geophysicist. He was in graduate school at UCLA and had been prepared by previous mentors to enter the geophysics field. But a 1973 department-wide test focused on seismology, rather than fields that he understood better, and his days as …
Continue reading "Using Climate Science on Earth to Understand Planets Beyond Earth"
There is no doubt that early Mars had long period of warmer and much wetter climates before its atmosphere thinned too much to retain that liquid H20 on the surface. As we know from the Curiosity mission to Gale Crater and other orbital findings, regions of that warmer and wetter Mars had flowing water …
Just about everything that scientists see as essential for extraterrestrial life -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and sources of energy -- is now known to be pretty common in our solar system and beyond. It's basically there for the taking by untold potential forms of life. But what is not at all common …
Saturn's moon Titan has lakes and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons, temperatures that hover around -300 degrees Fahrenheit, and a thick haze that surrounds it and has cloaked it in mystery. An unusual place for sure, but perhaps what's most unusual is that Titan more closely resembles Earth of all the planets and moons in our …
Continue reading "Mapping Titan, the Most Earth-Like Body in Our Solar System"
Candidate exoplanets as seen by TESS in a southern sky mosaic from 13 observing sectors. (NASA/MIT/TESS) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has finished its one year full-sky observation of Southern sky and has found hundreds of candidate exoplanets and 29 confirmed planets. It is now maneuvering its array of wide-field telescopes and cameras to …
Many Worlds 
