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Ever wondered how life began and whether there is life on other planets? You're not alone, but the curiosity rarely turns into a career. The UW astrobiology program gives hope to would-be professional stargazers. Astrobiology -- the study of life in the universe -- looks for scientific answers to questions like "How did life begin on this planet?" and "Are we alone in the universe?" The field builds on knowledge across several disciplines. UW biology professor Peter Ward and UW astronomy professor Donald Brownlee believe discovering intelligent aliens on other planets is unlikely. In Rare Earth, a book the two...

Goldilocks isn’t the only one who demanded everything to be “just right.” The Earth and its fellow seven planets also needed perfect conditions to form as observed, and those right conditions occur rarely, a new computer simulation shows. The new simulation, described in the Aug. 8 Science, is the first to trace from beginning to end how planetary systems form from an initial gas disk encircling a baby star. “The really striking result of the new model is how chaotic and even violent the average story of a planet’s birth is,” says Edward Thommes, an astrophysicist now at the University...

Are We Alone?Our recent success on Mars leaves us no reason to think otherwise--and reason to ponder what makes the earth unique. By: Jay W. Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez The American Spectator May 1, 2004 The American taxpayers recently footed the bill for a risky $800 million NASA mission. The good news? It worked. In January, two NASA landers bounced to their destinations and released their rovers Spirit and Opportunity to prowl the Martian landscape. These remarkable little robots were not searching for archaeological ruins or strange, black monoliths but something much less exotic--the fingerprints of water in liquid form....

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-02a.html A Universe Of Life: Maybe Not by Karl Hill Las Cruces - Jan 7, 2002 This vast universe surely holds plenty of worlds where life can flourish, right? Don't bet on it, says New Mexico State University physicist Slava Solomatov. The more scientists learn about the conditions that make life possible on Earth, the more they realize how complex those factors are -- and how a relatively small change in one condition or another could have rendered the planet uninhabitable, Solomatov said. "It's a very finely tuned system," he said. "Some of the factors are well known, but we ...

Earth-like worlds circling stars in orbital zones suitable for life may be few and far between in the cosmos, according to new research. In the first comprehensive study of extrasolar planetary systems, astronomers have shown that in most of them it would not be possible to keep an Earth-like world in orbit around a star so that it was neither too hot nor too cold for life. In general, other planetary systems fall into two types: those with Jupiter-like worlds circling close to their parent star, and those with more distant Jupiters in elliptical orbits. In both systems, maintaining an...

Our solar system may be unique after all, despite the discovery of at least 120 other systems with planets, astronomers said on Wednesday. All the other solar systems that have been found have big, gassy planets circling too close to their stars to allow them to be anything like Earth or its fellow planets, the British and U.S.-based researchers said. If that is the case, Earth-like planets will be very rare, the astronomers write in the latest issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "Maybe these other extrasolar systems ... contain only the giant planets," said Mario...

In 1993, French astronomer Jacques Laskar ran a series of calculations indicating that the gravity of the Moon is vital to stabilizing the tilt of our planet. Earth's obliquity, as this tilt is technically known as, has huge repercussions for climate. Laskar argued that should Earth's obliquity wander over hundreds of thousands of years, it would cause environmental chaos by creating a climate too variable for complex life to develop in relative peace. So his argument goes, we should feel remarkably lucky to have such a large moon on our doorstep, as no other terrestrial planet in our solar system...

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

The moon formed after a nasty planetary collision with young Earth, yet it looks odd next to its watery orbital neighbor. Turns out it really is odd: Only about one in every 10 to 20 solar systems may harbor a similar moon. New observations made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of stellar dust clouds suggest that moons like Earth's are—at most—in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems. "When a moon forms from a violent collision, dust should be blasted everywhere," said Nadya Gorlova, an astronomer at the University of Florida in Gainesville who analyzed the telescope data in...

Moons like the Earth's - which are formed in catastrophic collisions - are extremely rare in the Universe, a study by US astronomers suggests. The Moon was created when an object as big as the planet Mars smacked into the Earth billions of years ago. The impact hurled debris into orbit, some of which eventually consolidated to form our Moon. The Astrophysical Journal reports that just 5-10% of planetary systems in the Universe have moons created this way.

Earth's flora is responsible for the glaciers and rivers that have created this planet's distinctive landscapeAstronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants. We all know how Earth's landscape came about, right? Oceans and land masses formed, mountains rose, and precipitation washed over its surface; rivers weathered bare rock to create soil and plants took root. Well, new research...

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.The astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, an experienced planet hunter and co-author of the study that generated the finding, said that it “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.” But “possibility” is not the same as likelihood. If a planet is to be inhabited rather than merely habitable,...

Exoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe--most vastly different from Earth By Shannon Hall on February 19, 2016 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Email Print Share via Google+Stumble Upon NASA/ESA/ESO Advertisement More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been...

Five Out of Five Researchers Agree: Earth's Solar System Special By Sara Goudarzi Special to SPACE.com posted: 31 March 2005 NEW YORK -- Though researchers find more and more distant planets revolving around alien suns, the discoveries highlight that Earth and its solar system may be an exceptionally rare place indeed. That was the consensus here Wednesday evening among five planetary science experts who spoke at the 5th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate held at the American Museum of Natural History. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, moderated the informal discussion. At issue...

Rare Jewel: Earth-like Planets May Be Very Rare Msgr. Charles Pope • February 28, 2016 • I have written a good bit over the years about what is known as the “Rare Earth” Hypothesis. A recent blog on discovermagazine.com ponders how high the odds are against the existence of another Earth-like planet. More on that in a moment. But first let’s review some of the basics of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.While most people, including most scientists, believe that there may be billions of inhabitable planets out there a capable of sustaining complex life, the Rare Earth Hypothesis suggests that...

VIDEO AT LINK................ It’s been 30 years since the discovery of the first planet around another star like our Sun. With every new discovery, scientists move closer to answering whether there are other planets like Earth that could host life as we know it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found. The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so...

A rare cosmic configuration: An Einstein Cross with five points of light, instead of the usual four, has been discovered by scientists. (Credit: Nicolás Lira Turpaud (ALMA Observatory) & adapted from Cox et al. 2025) Brightest Glimpse Yet Of Dark Matter Comes From Rare Cosmic Lens In A Nutshell * Astronomers discovered HerS-3 forming a rare Einstein Cross with five images instead of four. * Computer models required a hidden dark matter halo of 1.6–10 trillion solar masses to explain the pattern. * The galaxy is magnified 17–19 times, revealing rapid star formation and high-speed gas outflows. * This is...

It looked like the Sun was heading toward a historic lull in activity. That trend flipped in 2008, according to new research. The Sun has become increasingly active since 2008, a new NASA study shows. Solar activity is known to fluctuate in cycles of 11 years, but there are longer-term variations that can last decades. Case in point: Since the 1980s, the amount of solar activity had been steadily decreasing all the way up to 2008, when solar activity was the weakest on record. At that point, scientists expected the Sun to be entering a period of historically low activity....

1:45 Look at 3I Atlas at 12 O'Clock and Swan at 6 O'Clock (think strategic)🚨

Imagine looking up during a total lunar eclipse, expecting the moon to turn deep red—and then you notice a faint green glow from a mysterious visitor not from our solar system. That’s exactly what happened with 3I/ATLAS, and its unexpected color shift is opening a window into new comet chemistry and the nature of interstellar visitors. What is 3I/ATLAS and What Has Been Seen So Far 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed interstellar object (ISO) ever observed, and it’s behaving in ways that are surprising astronomers. Discovered on July 1, 2025, by the survey system ATLAS in Chile, 3I/ATLAS has been...