“Astronomers have spent the last decades trying to understand what detectable traces of biological life, called ‘biosignatures,’ might exist in the universe,” said Penn State astrophysicist Jason Wright about NASA’s funding a new effort to look for “technosignatures” other than radio signals based on the principle that alien technology is going to be based on physics and chemistry. “We’ve recently started asking what technological signatures an extraterrestrial civilization might leave behind that could be seen from Earth.”
New research based on huge simulations involving hundreds of processors on the Australian National Computing Infrastructure using parameters run through a unique geodynamics code simulating the development of the interior of planets, showed that many early planets would have tended to develop a magnetic field and plate tectonics than planets formed later in the Milky Way, which is favorable to the development of life.
Andrew Siemion, director of the University of California Berkeley SETI Research Center, recently wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy that “I suspect there are other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy– we just need to look!” Now, new calculations place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star in our Galaxy, according to University of British Columbia researcher Michelle Kunimoto about six billion rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like (G) stars in the Milky Way.
New research suggests that searches for extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations not only reveals the existence of how life forms, but also gives us clues for how long our own civilization will last, according to astrophysicist Christopher Conselice, based on the hypothesis that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on exoplanets, as it did on Earth.
“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.
Using the Lovell Telescope, an international team led by Jodrell Bank Observatory discovered 32 fast radio bursts (FRBs), among the most enigmatic and powerful events in the cosmos, initially thought to be one-off events over a four-year study, revealing the presence of a regular sequence in the burst activity could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole. The emission from the FRB, known as 121102, follows a cyclic pattern, with radio bursts observed in a window lasting approximately 90 days followed by a silent period of 67 days. The same behavior then repeats every 157 days.
