Statistically, it’s pretty much a given that alien life is out there somewhere, whether that’s Martian microbes or highly intelligent life beaming comms through the cosmos. While the Curiosity rover is poking around in the dirt for the former, the Breakthrough Listen initiative is searching for the latter. Now, a new telescope array has joined the hunt, scanning the skies for flashes of laser light that alien civilizations might be giving off.
Scientists think they’ve found a way to terraform Mars — and all it takes is a thin blanket of insulation over future space gardens.
A layer of aerogel just two to three centimeters thick may be enough to protect plants from the harshest aspects of life on Mars and create viable greenhouses in the process, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. While there are a host of other problems to solve before anyone can settle Mars, this terraforming plan is far more feasible than other ideas that scientists have proposed.
Two of the biggest challenges facing Martian settlers are the Red Planet’s deadly temperatures and unfiltered solar radiation, which is able to pass through Mars’ weak atmosphere and reach the surface, New Scientist reports. At night, it can reach −100 degrees Celsius, which is far too cold for any Earthly crops to survive.
O.o…
Black holes are engines of destruction on a cosmic scale, but they may also be the bringers of life. New research on supermassive black holes suggests that the radiation they emit during feeding frenzies can create biomolecular building blocks and even power photosynthesis.
The upshot? Far more worlds roaming the Milky Way and beyond could be suitable to life, the researchers speculated.
For their new study, published May 24 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists created computer models to look at the radiating disks of gas and dust called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, that swirl around supermassive black holes. Some of the brightest objects in the universe, AGN form as a black hole’s gravity binds matter. As that matter swirls around a black hole, it releases incredible amounts of light and radiation. [9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind].
I used to think that we live in some sort of a “cosmic jungle”, so the Zoo Hypothesis (like Star Trek Prime Directive) should be the correct explanation to the Fermi Paradox, right? I wouldn’t completely rule out this hypothesis insofar as a theorist Michio Kaku allegorically compares our earthly civilization to an “anthill” next to the “ten-lane superhighway” of a galactic-type civilization. Over time, however, I’ve come to realize that the physics of information holds the key to the solution of the Fermi Paradox — indications are we most likely live in a “syntellect chrysalis” instead of a “cosmic jungle.”
Just like a tiny mustard seed in the soil, we’ll get to grow out of the soil, see “the light of the day” and network by roots and pollen with others, at the cosmic level of emergent complexity — as a civilizational superorganism endowed with its own advanced extradimensional consciousness. So, one day our Syntellect, might “wake up” as some kind of a newborn baby of the intergalactic family (or multiversal family, for that matter – that remains to be seen) within the newly perceived reality framework. Call it the Chrysalis Conjecture, if you’d like.*.
Watch enough movies in which aliens contact humans, and you’ll notice a trend: the people deciding how Earth should respond to the extraterrestrial communications are usually politicians or scientists.
But the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) thinks the average person should have a say in how Earth responds if aliens ever decide to say “hello” to humanity.
An exoplanet 22.5 light years away that orbits in a system with three stars has the perfect conditions for us to search its atmosphere for signs of alien life.
Every now and again, our radio telescopes capture a mystery. A single flash, as powerful in radio wavelengths as half-a-billion Suns, condensed into a burst that lasts just a few milliseconds at most. Now, for the very first time, astrophysicists have traced one of these one-off fast radio bursts (FRBs) to its source.
“This is the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts in 2007,” said astro-engineer Keith Bannister of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
The signal has been named FRB 180924 — they’re named for the date of detection — and it originated in the outskirts of a Milky Way-sized galaxy roughly 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.
When you think about black holes, you think about destruction! But new research suggests that black hole radiation could help cook life on some planets.
“Both Teegarden’s planets are potentially habitable,” says Ignasi Ribas of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia, a member of the team reporting the planets today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “We will eventually see if they are actually habitable and, perhaps, even inhabited.”
The two worlds orbit a star so faint that it wasn’t even spotted until 2003, when NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden was mining astronomical data sets and looking for dim, nearby dwarf stars that had so far evaded detection.
Teegarden’s star is a stellar runt that’s barely 9 percent of the sun’s mass. It’s known as an ultra-cool M dwarf, and it emits most of its light in the infrared—just like the star TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven known rocky planets. But Teegarden’s star is just a third as far from Earth as the TRAPPIST-1 system, which makes it ideal for further characterization.
