“The Kepler and K2 missions just keep on giving!” Harvard astrophysicist, David Latham told The Daily Galaxy. “Operations ended more than three years ago when the spacecraft ran out of fuel, but we continue to mine the data archives for celestial gems.”
“NASA’s search for life in the Universe is focused on so-called Habitable Zone planets, which are worlds that have the potential for liquid water oceans,” says Stephanie Olson at the University of Chicago. “But not all oceans are equally hospitable–and some oceans will be better places to live than others due to their global circulation patterns”.
“We have been observing this star for three years to look for periodic variations in its velocity,” explains Mathias Zechmeister, a researcher at the University of Göttingen. The observations showed that two planets are orbiting it, both of them similar to the planets in the inner part of the Solar System. They are just a little bigger than the Earth and are situated in the “inhabitable zone” where water can exist as a liquid.
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.
“Our new algorithm helps to draw a more realistic picture of the exoplanet population in space,” says Michael Hippke of Germany’s Sonneberg Observatory about 18 previously undetected planets buried in data from the Kepler Space Telescope, one of which orbits its red dwarf star within the habitable zone. “This method constitutes a significant step forward, especially in the search for Earth-like planets.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily 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.
The Fourth Copernican Revolution: “Our Universe May Be One Patch of Space and Time In a Infinite Archipelago” (Weekend Feature)
Human Imprint on Earth’s Rocks to Our Inner Fish (Planet Earth Report)
What the First Two Pictures of Black Holes Tell Us to What If Aliens We are Looking for are AI? (The Galaxy Report)
The Most Massive Objects in the Modern Universe –Primordial Relics of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Antarctica’s ‘Factorian Deep’ to Can We Think Without Language? (Planet Earth Report)
Mystery of Our Lopsided Universe to China’s Alien-Signal False Alarm (The Galaxy Report)
3-D Views of Interstellar Supernova “Cavities” Reveal Explosive Star-forming RegionsWhy the US Navy is Listening to Shrimp to Google has Not Created Sentient AI — Yet (Planet Earth Report)
Seven Unsolved Solar-System Mysteries to Most Important Equation in the Cosmos (The Galaxy Report)
Something Strange is Impacting the Atmosphere of Venus: Is it Life?
