Tag Archives: space exploration

the new exoplanets

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This long NASA article first gets you excited about the possibility of life on eight new planets it has just discovered, and then throws cold water (actually, make that lethal X-rays) all over your excitement. Still, the possibility of some kind of “slime” exists, which I guess is something.

Scientists are pondering the possibilities after this week’s announcement: the discovery of seven worlds orbiting a small, cool star some 40 light-years away, all of them in the ballpark of our home planet in terms of their heft (mass) and size (diameter). Three of the planets reside in the “habitable zone” around their star, TRAPPIST-1, where calculations suggest that conditions might be right for liquid water to exist on their surfaces—though follow-up observations are needed to be sure…

Recent findings suggest life would have an uphill battle on a planet close to a red dwarf, largely because such stars are extremely active in their early years—shooting off potentially lethal flares and bursts of radiation…

But so little is known about how life gets its start, and how common or rare it might be in the cosmos, that tenacious life on M-dwarf planets remains a distinct possibility.

However rare life might be, it would make all the difference to find it in just one more place besides Earth. Because if we find it in one more place, and are sure it arose independently of Earth, that would mean it is probably present in many more places. If we never find life anywhere else, we could consider the possibility of seeding other planets with some kind of life from Earth. This way, even if we don’t last forever, intelligent life would have a chance to arise again after a few billion years.

Obama on Mars

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Obama continues to write op-eds at a furious pace.

We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time. Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we’re already well on our way. Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station…

The next step is to reach beyond the bounds of Earth’s orbit. I’m excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth — something we’ll need for the long journey to Mars.

will E.T. ever phone (our) home?

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E.T. was one of the first movies I remember seeing in a theater (I was terrified.) 34 years later, if I am counting correctly, we are still waiting for extraterrestrials to return our calls. The New York Times has a review of four new books on the subject, including one (partially) by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE: An Astrophysical Tour (Princeton University, $39.95), revisits the Drake equation using contemporary data. The equation holds that the number of communicating alien civilizations is a function of seven variables, starting with the rate at which new stars are born in our galaxy, the fraction of these stars that host planets and the number of planets per star that are habitable. In 1961, scientists could fill in only one variable; the other six were sheer guesswork. With our advanced understanding of the cosmos, Tyson — whose book is written with the astrophysicists Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott — is able to work out, in some technical detail, a more sophisticated estimate. The verdict? According to his calculations, we might expect to find as many as 100 alien civilizations in our galaxy communicating with radio waves right now. “So,” he concludes, “we have a chance.”

The unambiguous discovery of an alien signal, if it ever happens, would instantly be the biggest event in human history. It could happen tomorrow, or decades from now, or never. Then again, since we’ve had a few false alarms, we might not recognize or believe a real signal at first, only confirming it after some period of time has passed. I wonder, would we just shrug it off and continue with our lives, or would it really change the way we think about ourselves and our place in the universe.

possible alien signal

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from KurzweilAI:

On May 15, 2015, Russian astronomers picked up a radio signal on the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Russia “in the direction of HD164595,” an international group of astronomers stated in a document* now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov, according to Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams, who blogged about the data on Saturday, August 27, 2016…

Power required for such a signal would be astronomical, he explains. If broadcast in all directions, the required power is 1020 watts (100 billion billion watts) — hundreds of times more energy than all the sunlight falling on Earth. If aimed at us, assuming an antenna the size of the 1000-foot Arecibo instrument, they would still need to transmit more than a trillion watts.

In addition, the signal was received at 11Ghz (2.7 cm wavelength), in a part of the radio spectrum used by the military, so the signal may be due to terrestrial radio-frequency interference, or to gravitational lensing from a more distant source.

Death Star Discovered

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These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated. The images have been magnified from their original size. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Apparently the Death Star was not destroyed after all.

Cruising through the asteroid belt, NASA Dawn spacecraft is approaching dwarf planet Ceres, and some puzzling features are coming into focus.

“We expected to be surprised by Ceres,” says Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at UCLA. “We did not expect to be this puzzled.”

The camera on Dawn can now see Ceres more clearly than any previous image taken of the dwarf planet, revealing craters and mysterious bright spots.

Mysterious bright spots…I find it odd that this article doesn’t even speculate as to what they might be. Just an optical illusion of some sort? A mineral, radioactive or otherwise? Life, intelligent or otherwise? Aliens preparing to invade? Okay, probably not the latter, because if we got to them before they got to us, we are probably the more advanced species of space monkeys.

Incidentally, on the Death Star issue, the article says this thing has a diameter of 605 miles (974 km). According to the definitive source Wookiepedia, the second Death Star had a diameter of 900 km. So it’s about the right size, given that you don’t know how people come up with these things to begin with. For reference, the Moon has a diameter of about 2,100 miles (3,500 km).