While alien life can be seen nightly on television and in the movies, it has never been seen in space. Not so much as a microbe, dead or alive, let alone a wrinkle-faced Klingon. Despite this lack of protoplasmic…
Enrico Fermi, when asked about intelligent life on other planets, famously replied, “Where are they?” Any civilisation advanced enough to undertake interstellar travel would, he argued, in a brief period…
Given that we are unlikely to be visiting an exoplanet any time soon, astronomers have been contemplating whether it might be possible to detect indications of simple life – a biosignature – from a distance…
Let’s hope it’s barren.
NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same…
Rocky planets larger than Earth could not sustain life because their thick, crushing hydrogen atmospheres would be deadly…
Rocky, water-rich asteroids and similar objects likely delivered the bulk of water on
Earth. Now they’re being found well outside our Solar system.
Mark A. Garlick, space-art.co.uk, University of Warwick and University of Cambridge
How will future alien scientists know whether life existed in our solar system? One method may be to sift through the planetary debris left when our sun becomes a white dwarf. Astronomers are doing just…
The “Rocknest” site has been Curiosity’s laboratory for the past few months.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
The Curiosity rover has landed on Mars, driven around, started its scientific mission and, as of 4am today (AEDT), started reporting integrated science results. In a news conference at the American Geophysical…
Meteorites from Mars may have seeded life on Earth – or not.
NASA
In an announcement today, NASA poured cold water on rumours that its Curiosity rover had found life on Mars. Curiosity found evidence that it had landed on an ancient riverbed, and it identified some interesting…
We can learn a lot about the conditions life can endure by looking under the ice of Antarctica.
Eugene Kaspersky
The search for life in extreme environments is an exploration not only of the robustness of earthly life, but also of our origins. And perhaps the biggest question here is whether the earth is a unique…
The building blocks of life have been discovered on Mars … in Martian meteorites that fell to Earth. Let me rephrase that: according to a paper by published in Science Express on Friday, meteorites from…
Drilling could provide insights on Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
Shandchem
Late last week the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) announced they had successfully drilled into the elusive sub-glacial Lake Vostok, a body of water lying under nearly 4km of Antarctic…
Are we getting closer to solving one of life’s greatest mysteries?
jcoterhals
During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly…