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By watching for a special kind of flare, astronomers have identified the fingerprints of an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star.The planet orbits its host star, a dim “M dwarf,” just at the edge of the habitable zone — the region where liquid water could exist. Jupiter’s moon Io — the solar system’s most volcanic world — has inspired a new way to find distant exoplanets. As the moon orbits Jupiter, it tugs on the planet’s magnetic field, generating bright auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Even if we couldn’t see Io itself, the enormous auroras, pulsing to the beat of...

Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a cool, dim star called Trappist-1 in the constellation of Aquarius will be high up on the hit list. Computer models suggest the Trappist-1 system is among the most promising for finding planets with atmospheres and temperatures that would enable liquid water to exist on the surface. “The James Webb Telescope will be able to tell us whether they have atmospheres like the Earth or Venus,” said Meadows. “It gives us our first real chance to search for gases given off by life on another planet. We’re basically going to get to study Earth’s cousins.”

The UK's Astronomer Royal, Professor Lord Rees, is the chair of the organisation's international advisory group. He told the BBC that, given that the multi-billion pound Large Hadron Collider had not yet achieved its aim of finding sub-atomic particles beyond the current theory of physics, governments should consider modest funding of a few million pounds for Seti. "I'd feel far more confident arguing the case for Seti than for a particle accelerator," he said. "Seti searches are surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high". Nasa once funded the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence to...

Astronomers have never before seen fast radio bursts being emitted in such a regular pattern, and still don't know their origin. Astronomers have detected alien signals - that is, signals from a foreign galaxy - being emitted in an unusually regular 16-day cycle. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are not in and of themselves unusual - the first was detected in 2007 - but previous observations have shown them to be mostly emitted at random. While there have been some bursts which repeated, as astronomers discovered previously, they have never been seen repeating in such a steady cycle. The origin of...

A fascinating essay that lay hidden for decades reveals Winston Churchill’s views on alien life. The never-published essay has been in the archive of the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri since the 1980s, when it was given to the museum by the wife of Churchill’s publisher, who had died. Last year the museum invited Israeli astrophysicist Mario Livio to review the essay, which he discusses in an article published in the science journal Nature. Livio notes the British wartime leader’s passion for science and technology in the 1939 essay, as well as Churchill’s thoughts on extraterrestrials. Apparently influenced by...

A newly unearthed essay by Winston Churchill shows Britain's wartime leader was uncannily prescient about the possibility of alien life on planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. The 11-page article was drafted on the eve of World War Two in 1939 and updated in the 1950s, decades before astronomers discovered the first extrasolar planets in the 1990s. Yet Churchill pinpointed issues dominating today's debate about extraterrestrial life, proving that the former prime minister "reasoned like a scientist", according to an analysis of his work published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

A new exoplanet only 4.2 light years away would prove that there's plenty left to discover in our own cosmic backyard. Scientists have found evidence of a new exoplanet candidate orbiting our closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. This exoplanet candidate, Proxima c, likely has a mass six times that of Earth. But it's unlikely that life would survive on the planet, given its frigid temperatures. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The red dwarf star Proxima Centauri is our closest stellar neighbor; the star system is a measly 4.2 light years from Earth and can be seen with the naked eye. Because of this proximity,...

The oldest solid material on Earth has just been identified, and it predates the Solar System itself by at least a few hundred million years. The teensy tiny microscopic grains of dust were forged in a distant star somewhere between 5 and 7 billion years ago, according to new research. By comparison, our Sun is just 4.6 billion years old. Eventually, these grains were carried to Earth in a meteorite. "This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," said cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. "These are the...

TOI 700 d is a landmark discovery for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite NASA’s newest planet hunter just bagged some big game. For the first time, the agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a roughly Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its host star, the zone of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world’s surface, researchers announced today (Jan. 6). The newfound exoplanet, known as TOI 700 d, lies just 101.5 light-years from Earth, making it a good candidate for follow-up observations by other instruments, scientists added. “TESS was designed and launched specifically...

Astronomers unveiled new insights by NASA's TESS this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. The satellite spotted a new Earth-like exoplanet within its star's habitable zone, a new Tatooine star system, and a strange eclipse. TESS has been working hard to uncover new corners of the universe since its launch in 2018. Exoplanet enthusiasts, rejoice! This week, scientists revealed a series of new discoveries made by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The telescope has spotted a number of strange new worlds circling star systems near and far, the scientists announced at the 235th meeting of...

[R]esearchers using NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of a nearby planet called TOI 700 d. The world sits comfortably in the habitable zone of its host star, and from what astronomers can tell, it appears to be a lot like Earth. The best part? It's relatively close. Okay, so as we've all come to learn, "close" is a relative term when we're talking about objects in space. In the case of TOI 700 d, "close" means that the planet is hanging out at a distance of around 100 light-years. That's...

A mysterious repeating radio signal from space revealed last year is now the fifth fast radio burst to be tracked back to its source galaxy. It's a location unlike any of the others, and astronomers are having to rethink their previous assumptions about how these signals are generated. The origin of this repeating signal is a spiral galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, making it the closest known source of what we call fast radio bursts (FRBs) yet. And the FRBs are emanating specifically from a region just seven light-years across - a region that's alive with star formation....

Mission operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have lost contact with the ASTERIA satellite, a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system. The last successful communication with ASTERIA, short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, was on Dec. 5; attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020. ASTERIA belongs to a category of satellites called CubeSats, which vary in size but are typically smaller than a suitcase. Deployed into Earth orbit from the space station on Nov. 20, 2017, the technology demonstration mission showed that many technologies necessary for...

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward. Now their puffed-up hydrogen/helium atmospheres are bleeding off into space. Eventually, much smaller planets might be left behind. The background starfield is correctly plotted as...

If there is life in the Solar System outside of Earth, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus are two of the most likely spots to hold them. However, any extraterrestrial creatures on these celestial objects probably are not related to us, according to a new study. The research, presented at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union by Purdue University geophysicist Jay Melosh, looked at the idea of "lithopanspermia," an idea that life hopped from one planet to another via rocks that were ejected into space, according to Space.com, which first reported the news. [snip] In June,...

In the first of these new images, taken on Nov. 16, the comet was approximately 203 million miles from Earth, seen in front of a distant spiral galaxy known as 2MASX J10500165-0152029, according to a NASA statement. You can see the comet's tail of dust up to the right. You can also see that the object's bright core looks smudged, as Hubble was imaging the object while also tracking its movement. In both images, 2I/Borisov has been artificially colored blue so that details can be seen in the coma, or envelope of dust and material that surrounds the comet's core,...

An international team of scientists at NASA have found sugar molecules on two different meteorites, the agency announced on Nov. 19. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites and supports the theory that chemical reactions in asteroids can play an important role in creating and supporting life, the space agency said in a statement. Researchers said they discovered “ribose and other bio-essential sugars” in the extraterrestrial rock, adding that ribose is a “crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid)”—essential for the regulation and expression of genes. “In much of modern...

An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites, supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids – the parent bodies of many meteorites – can make some of life’s ingredients. If correct, meteorite bombardment on ancient Earth may have assisted the origin of life with a supply of life’s building blocks. Image of asteroid Bennu This is a mosaic image of asteroid Bennu, from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The discovery of sugars in meteorites supports the hypothesis that chemical reactions...

NASA engineers are already working on an underwater rover they hope could one day tackle the challenges posed by ocean worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. A team has been working on such a robot, called Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration or BRUIE, for a few years now. NASA is taking a prototype of that rover to Antarctica for testing in the most similar environment to those moons found on Earth. The tests will take place at Australia's Casey research station along the coast of Antarctica far south of Australia, where BRUIE will spend a month exploring...

Astronomers have discovered a massive exoplanet orbiting Gliese 3512 (GJ 3512), an M-dwarf star (red dwarf) located 31 light-years away. Dubbed Gliese 3512b, the planet has a mass of 0.46 Jupiter masses, very high for such a small host star, and an eccentric 204-day orbit. Using simulations, the researchers have also demonstrated that the Gliese 3512 planetary system challenges generally accepted theories of planet formation. M-dwarf stars are low-mass stars that emit most of their faint light in the near-infrared. They the most common type of star in the Milky Way. However, despite their ubiquity, only about 10% of nearly...