In the Milky Way Galaxy, about three-fourths of the stars are M dwarfs, and the proportion is even higher in elliptical galaxies. But there’s a deadly catch. New research indicates orbiting close to these low-mass stars, prime targets for astronomers in the search for extraterrestrial life, may have lost their window of opportunity at hosting life because of intense heat during their formative years. M dwarfs, also known as red dwarfs, are the smallest type of hydrogen-burning star and are the most common stars and the coolest main-sequence stars in the universe.
“The idea of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life is no more speculative than extra dimensions or dark matter. It fact, he says, it is less so,” says Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb.
(For the Holiday Season, from Christmas through New Year’s Day. we’ll post 2020’s most viewed articles as ranked by Google Analytics.)
The research study of Spanish clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G. De la Torre, Does artificial intelligence dream of non-terrestrial techno-signatures?, suggests that one of the “potential applications of artificial intelligence is not only to assist in big data analysis but to help to discern possible artificiality or oddities in patterns of either radio signals, megastructures or techno-signatures in general.”
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” said Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life. “So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that the next rover Perseverance will help to answer.”
“It’s worthwhile to not just do what was done 60 years ago, but also to keep an eye out for very unusual things,” says SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak. “The universe has been around for three times as long as the Earth has been around, so there could be aliens out there that are very, very much more advanced than we are—not just 1,000 years, but millions and billions of years ahead.”
