“For a long time, scientists were really focused on finding sun- and Earth-like systems. That’s all we knew. But we found out that there’s this whole crazy diversity in planets. We found planets as small as the moon. We found giant planets. And we found some that orbit tiny stars, giant stars and multiple stars,” said Elisa Quintana, a NASA Goddard astrophysicist who led the 2014 discovery of Earth-sized planet Kepler-186f about the use of NASA’s Discover supercomputer to determine whether any of more than 4,000 distinctly strange exoplanets discovered in the past two decades could support life.
Arthur C. Clarke, author of Space Odyssey 2001, famously warned “attempt no landing” to explore Europa, the most intriguing of Jupiter’s 79 moons, perhaps anticipating the “almost a racing certainty” that there’s alien life on the moon according to a leading British space scientist, Monica Grady, a professor of Planetary and Space Science at Liverpool Hope University. Grady proposes that the frigid ocean beneath Europa’s layer of ice up to 15 miles deep could harbor octopus-like creatures.
“The Galaxy Report” provides summaries and links to headline news by leading science journalists about the amazing discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the Cosmos beyond. Our caffine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
“Planet Earth Report” provides summaries of 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. Our caffine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
“Do living creatures would need cell membranes to survive,” ask Hilda Sandström and Martin Rahm with the Initiatives on Cosmic Origins at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, probing two of the most central questions in astrobiology –“what are environmental and chemical limits of life?” This unsolved mystery led them to explore the possibility of life on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Often described as harboring conditions similar to early Earth, they used computer modeling to determine whether “polarity-inverted” membranes dubbed “azotosomes” –hypothetical structures that lack the phosphorus and oxygen found in membranes on Earth but contain nitrogen– could self-assemble under Titan’s extreme environment.
