“Something is the cause of the fact that there aren’t a huge amount of UFOs out there,” says Uffe Gråe Jørgensen, head of Astrophysics & Planetary Science group at the Niels Bohr Institute, about the huge difference between being one of the 10 billion Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, and being habitable or having developed a technological civilization.
“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” said Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life. “So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that the next rover Perseverance will help to answer.”
“Historically, our assumption has been that the region around Jupiter is fairly empty, cleaned out by the giant planet’s gravity, but our results teach us that there is a region that is constantly being fed,” said Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 2019 about a constant source of new objects that may help explain the surprising rate of icy body impacts with Jupiter, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event in 1994 when over twenty fragments of comet that collided with Jupiter were observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world.
Was Venus, described by Stephen Hawking as Earth’s “kissing cousin,” the solar system’s first habitable planet? Scientists have recently conjectured that Venus may have been radically different from the hellish Venus we see today, resembling Earth for its first three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. Fast forward to the 21st century –strange dark patches, enigmas, “unknown absorbers” have been detected floating inside the clouds of Venus capturing large amounts of solar radiation that may prove to be extraterrestrial microorganisms.
“Human blood is a testament to life’s origin in the ocean,” observed marine biologist Jacques Cousteau, “its chemical composition is nearly identical to that of sea-water.” New research funded by NASA appears to confirm Cousteau’s insight. Scientists have identified a process that might have been key in producing the first organic molecules on Earth about 4 billion years ago, before the origin of life. The process, which is similar to what might have occurred in some ancient underwater hydrothermal vents, may also have relevance to the search for life elsewhere in the universe. (more…)
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
