“This is a completely novel way to search for life in the universe. Just imagine an alien world glowing softly in a powerful telescope,” said lead author Jack O’Malley-James, a researcher at Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute about ultraviolet radiation flares from red suns that might trigger a protective glow from life called biofluorescence.
On February 5, 2019, The Galaxy reported that if advanced, space-faring alien life exist anywhere in the Milky Way, odds are they will live in the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ). And if they want to explore the Milky Way searching for other life-bearing planets, similar to Earth, they would only have to explore the GHZ, not the whole of the Galaxy.
Astronomers are planning to hunt for cores of exoplanets around white dwarf stars that have burnt all of their fuel and shed their outer layers, destroying nearby objects and removing the outer layers of planets by ‘tuning in’ to the radio waves that they emit for up to a billion years.
Today’s insights and commentary from the world’s leading scientist’s Twitter and YouTube postings on astronomy, physics, biology, evolution, SETI, cosmology, genetics, and climate change.
The scorching hot exoplanet “hot Jupiter, WASP-121b, with an upper atmosphere reaching a blazing 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit, is sending heavy metals such as iron and magnesium into space. The distant planet’s atmosphere is so hot that metal is vaporizing and escaping the planet’s gravitational pull. The intense gravity of the planet’s host star has also deformed the sizzling planet into a football shape.
“This is exciting, as this is humanity’s first nearby super-Earth that could harbor life – uncovered with help from TESS, our small, mighty mission with a huge reach.” said Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute.
