Alien Life

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope Detects Light of Alien ‘Super Earth’

May 9, 2012

Seen here in this artist's concept, the planet is called 55 Cancri e. It's a toasty world that rushes around its star every 18 hours. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a “super-Earth” planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on other planets. “Spitzer has amazed us yet again,” said Bill Danchi, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.” The planet, called 55 Cancri e, falls into...

Nasa’s Kepler Spacecraft Narrows The Search For Goldilocks Planet

March 30, 2012

By Michael Muracco

Light reflected from a planet carries the 'fingerprint' of its atmospheric composition.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is discovering a veritable avalanche of alien worlds. Recent finds include planets with double suns, massive “super-Earths” and “hot Jupiters,” and a miniature solar system. The variety of planets circling distant suns is as wonderful as it is surprising. As the numbers mount, it seems to be just a matter of time before Kepler finds what astronomers are really looking for: an Earth-like planet orbiting its star in the “Goldilocks zone”—that is, at just the right distance for liquid water and life. “I believe Kepler will find a ‘Goldilocks planet’ within the next two years,” says...

Is There Microbial Life On Saturns Moon Enceladus?

March 28, 2012

By Michael Muracco

Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring.

In a series of tantalizingly close flybys to the moon, named “Enceladus,” NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed watery jets erupting from what may be a vast underground sea. These jets, which spew through cracks in the moon’s icy shell, could lead back to a habitable zone that is uniquely accessible in all the solar system. “More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus’s south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place,” says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “Cassini has...

New Exo-Planet Found In Habitable Zone 22 Light Years Away

February 3, 2012

By Michael Muracco

An artist's conception of the alien planet GJ 667Cc

A team of scientists from Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz using data from the Kepler space telescope have identified a planet 22 light-years away that could possibly harbor life. The planets star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements.This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed. The international team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler annoced their dicovery yesterday. The team used public data from...

NASA’s Mars Rover ‘Opportunity’ Continues Science Experiments As Martian Winter Approaches

February 1, 2012

By Michael Muracco

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity is positioned on the north end of Cape York on the rim of Endeavour Crater with an approximate 15-degree northerly tilt for favorable solar energy production during the winter. Opportunity is conducting regular radio Doppler tracking measurements to support geo-dynamic investigations of the planet, in-situ (contact) science investigations of the target, “Amboy” including an extended Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic, and continued collection of the 13-filter, 360-degree “Greeley” panorama. Decreasing energy levels with the approach to the winter solstice has constrained Opportunity for conducting both a radio Doppler tracking pass and an afternoon Ultra High Frequency...

Scientist Find Three Exo-Planets Smaller Than Earth

January 11, 2012

By Michael Muracco

A team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered the three smallest confirmed planets ever detected outside our solar system. The alien worlds, detected using publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler mission, are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the diameter of Earth, respectively; the smallest one is roughly Mars-size. The three exoplanets orbit a red dwarf star known as KOI-961, which is just one-sixth the size of our sun and is located 120 light-years away, in the Constellation Cygnus. The red dwarf, called KOI-961, was first flagged as a potential planetary system...

SETI Search Of Kepler Planets Receives First Candidate Signals

January 8, 2012

By Michael Muracco

The image above shows the radio signal detected by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia while scanning the exoplanetary candidate KOI 817 discovered by the Kepler mission. This is the kind of signal SETI scientists would expect to find if an alien civilization is transmitting.

In an effort to detect the radio emissions from a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know where to look. So, using data from the Kepler space telescope, astronomers are becoming more focused on “listening” for radio signals coming from stars known to have planets orbiting them. And it seems the first “candidate” signals have been detected! “We’ve started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals, which areundoubtedly examples of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI),” scientists of the University of California, Berkeley announced on Friday.The detection of these artificial signal...

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope Discovers First Earth Sized Exo-Planets

December 20, 2011

By Michael Muracco

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun. The discovery marks the next important milestone in the ultimate search for planets like Earth. The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth. Kepler-20f is slightly larger...

Could NASA’s MSL Rover “Curiosity” Contaminate Mars?

December 2, 2011

By Michael Muracco

During the preparation for the launch of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity on Nov. 26, a step in the “planetary protection” procedure wasn’t adhered to. The procedure’s key purpose is to make sure organic material from Earth doesn’t get transferred accidentally to the Red Planet. As reported by Space.com’s Leonard David, MSL project developers decided not to send a set of drill bits — attached to the rover’s exterior, ready to be used by the robotic arm’s drill — through a final ultra-cleanliness step before launch. This deviation in protocol wasn’t communicated to NASA’s planetary protection officer Cassie...

A New Proposal On Extraterrestial Life – A Radical Theory for the ‘Great Silence’

September 26, 2011

By Michael Muracco

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. As Enrico Fermi asked if the Universe is conducive to intelligent life, “Where is everybody?” A new answer proposed by Adrian Kent of the University of Cambridge and Perimeter Institute, is that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect evidence for the...