For most of human history, the question of whether or not extraterrestrial life exists has been philosophical. It’s only in recent years that we have had the hard-science modeling tools and observational technology to address this question. A team of astronomers from the University of Cambridge have found an exoplanet more than twice the size of Earth to be potentially habitable, opening the search for life to planets significantly larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Using the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b they determined that it’s possible for the planet to host liquid water at habitable conditions beneath its hydrogen-rich atmosphere.
“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. Our caffeine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
Before his death in 2018, Icelandic director and composer Johann Jóhannsson –director of Arrival and The Theory of Everything–adapted Last and First Men, a “future history” by British science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon –a “film that straddles the border of fiction and documentary. It is a meditation on memory and failed utopia.” The story –a channeled text from the last human species–describes the history of humanity from the present across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first.
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Astronomers are targeting the radio frequency range between 4 and 8 gigahertz, dubbed the C-band, said Breakthrough Listen principal investigator, astrophysicist Andrew Siemion of the University of California, Berkeley, who announced the release of nearly 2 petabytes of data, the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and the region around its central black hole, the second data dump from the four-year old search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
“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. Our caffeine-inspired curation team scours the world, doing your work for you –all in one place.
Radio signals bearing the tell-tale signature of aurorae caused by an interaction between a star and its planet has been predicted for over thirty-years. Now, for the first time astronomers have been able to detect the signature using the sensitive Dutch-led Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. opening the door to the discovery of exoplanets in the habitable zone.
