Are Homo sapiens a one-off, genetic accident? Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. It’s also possible that if there is extraterrestrial life, that it has, or will, develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.
Scientists with a NASA-led expedition are operating from the Inner Space Center at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography as colleagues explore the deep Pacific Ocean to prepare to search for life in deep space, blending ocean and space research to better understand if the watery worlds found on moons and planets in our solar system harbor conditions that could support microbial life.
A strange exoplanet, NGTS-4b, smaller than Neptune with its own atmosphere has been discovered in the Neptunian Desert, by an international collaboration of astronomers, with the University of Warwick taking a leading role. It is the first exoplanet of its kind to have been found in the Neptunian Desert –the region close to stars where no Neptune-sized planets are found. This area receives strong irradiation from the star, meaning the planets do not retain their gaseous atmosphere as they evaporate leaving just a rocky core.
Over 4000 exoplanets have been discovered since the first one in 1995, but the vast majority of them orbit their stars with relatively short periods of revolution. But five new planets have been discovered with periods of revolution between 15.6 and 40.4 years, with masses ranging approximately from 3 to 27 times that of Jupiter. A new study using the EULER telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile increases the list of 26 planets with a rotation period greater than 15 years.
“The history of life on Earth provides us with a wealth of information about how biology can overcome the challenges of environments we would think of as hostile,” said astronomer Jack O’Malley-James with the Carl Sagan Institute where his interests lie firmly at the intersection between astronomy, biology and geophysics, which is a perfect place from which to explore questions about how life would influence exoplanet atmospheres, climates and detectable biosignatures.
“This is a remarkable time in human history and a huge leap for our understanding of our place in the universe,” said astronomer Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University, a member of the TESS science team that will observe 400,000 stars across the whole sky to catch a glimpse of an exoplanet transiting across the face of its star. The stars selected are bright, cool dwarfs, with temperatures roughly between 2,700 and 5,000 degrees Kelvin. The closest are only approximately 6 light-years from Earth.
