Category Archives: extraterrestrial life

Primordial soup for you!

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The primordial soup in our solar system might be a lot more infected with organics than previously thought, although the results come from a computer, not a test tube:

Complex organic compounds, including many important to life on Earth, were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the primordial solar system. NAI-funded researcher Scott Sandford at NASA Ames Research Center and his colleague Fred Ciesla at the University of Chicago came to this conclusion after linking computer simulations to laboratory experiments. Their study appears in Science Express

Ciesla simulated the dynamics of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and the planets formed. Although every dust particle within the nebula behaved differently, they all experienced the conditions needed for organics to form over a simulated million-year period.

“Whenever you make a new planetary system, these kinds of things should go on,” said Sandford. “This potential to make organics and then dump them on the surfaces of any planet you make is probably a universal process.”

Although organic compounds are commonly found in meteorites and cometary samples, their origins presented a mystery. How important a role these compounds may have played in giving rise to the origin of life remains poorly understood, however. … (NASA Astrobiology)

Clean. Very clean.

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Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team’s analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012. The researchers have spent three years analysing data on Martian soil that was collected during the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars. Phoenix touched down in the northern arctic region of the planet to search for signs that it was habitable and to analyse ice and soil on the surface.

The results of the soil analysis at the Phoenix site suggest the surface of Mars has been arid for hundreds of millions of years, despite the presence of ice and the fact that previous research has shown that Mars may have had a warmer and wetter period in its earlier history more than three billion years ago. The team also estimated that the soil on Mars had been exposed to liquid water for at most 5,000 years since its formation billions of years ago. They also found that Martian and Moon soil is being formed under the same extremely dry conditions. …(SpaceRef)

Soon to be found?

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The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is once again searching planetary systems for signals that would be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Among its first targets are some of the exoplanet candidates recently discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

“This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations,” said Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That’s the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters.”

The ATA had been placed in hibernation mode last April as the result of the withdrawal of the SETI Institute’s former partner, U.C. Berkeley, due to budgetary shortfalls. Berkeley was the operator of the Hat Creek Observatory in northern California where the ATA is located. With new funding recently acquired for observatory operations, the ATA can resume SETI observations where it left off: examining the thousands of new candidate planets found by Kepler. Highest priority will be given to the handful of worlds discovered so far that are located in their star’s habitable zone: the range of orbital radii where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. Most astrobiologists consider that liquid water is the sine qua non for life.

“In SETI, as with all research, preconceived notions such as habitable zones could be barriers to discovery,” adds Tarter. “So, with sufficient future funding from our donors, it’s our intention to examine all of the planetary systems found by Kepler.”

Observations over the next two years will allow a systematic exploration of these Kepler discoveries across the entire, naturally-quiet 1 to 10 GHz terrestrial microwave window. The ATA is unique in providing ready access to tens of millions of channels at any one time, anywhere in this 9 billion channel range (each channel is 1 Hz wide). Until recently many SETI searches focused on limited frequency ranges, including a small number of observations at the 8.67 GHz spin-flip transition of the 3He+ ion, proposed by the team of Bob Rood (University of Virginia) and Tom Bania (Boston University). In memory of Rood, who died November 2, the initial ATA search of Kepler targets this week will focus around the 8.67 GHz band, before moving on to examine the billions of channels available for observation at the ATA.

The restart of SETI work at the ATA has been made possible thanks to the interest and generosity of the public who supported SETI research via the www.SETIStars.org web site. Additional funds necessary for observatory re-activation and operations are being provided by the United States Air Force as part of a formal assessment of the instrument’s utility for Space Situational Awareness (see www.seti.org/afspc for more information). … (SETI)

Star Trek Enterprise - Bound

a sample species to be found

Cradles of life

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Scientists from NAI’s New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have compiled years of research to help locate areas in outer space that have extreme potential for complex organic molecule formation. The scientists searched for methanol, a key ingredient in the synthesis of organic molecules that could lead to life. Their results have implications for determining the origins of molecules that spark life in the cosmos.

The findings appear in the Nov. 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal in a paper titled “Observational constraints on methanol production in interstellar and preplanetary ices.” The work is collaboration between researchers at Rensselaer, NASA Ames Research Center, the SETI Institute, and Ohio State University. … (NASA Astrobiology)

Alien life, a glimpse

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What does alien life look like, provided we find it? Many think of exotic creatures based on equally exotic pedigree. Even more people think of bipeds, big heads, big eyes, human-like with a twist. Go see Star Trek for an example of that.

It’s a small reminder that this is very unlikely. Just by looking at the various species on our own planet we get a glimpse of the diversity of life on only one planet, let alone the variety we’re bound to find on millions of planets.

And it’s not only weird microbes or weird shrimps. What to think of the creature below? It’s real, it’s a mammal like us, we know hardly a thing about it  – and it’s big. And it lives on the same planet as we do. Read more about alien life on Earth, the giant Armadillo. Cool, cool creature. (BBC)

Fat chance

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Are we alone? Yes, no, maybe. It all depends on how you calculate, it seems:

Scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) work under the assumption that there is, in fact, intelligent life out there to be found. A new analysis may crush their optimism.

To calculate the likelihood that they’ll make radio contact with extraterrestrials, SETI scientists use what’s known as the Drake Equation. Formulated by Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in California, it approximates the number of radio-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy at any one time by multiplying a string of factors: the number of stars, the fraction that have planets, the fraction of those that are habitable, the probability of life arising on such planets, its likelihood of becoming intelligent and so on.

The values of almost all these factors are highly speculative. Nonetheless, Drake and others have plugged in their best guesses, and estimate that there are about 10,000 tech-savvy civilizations in the galaxy currently sending signals our way — a number that has led some scientists to predict that we’ll detect alien signals within two decades.

Their optimism relies on one factor in particular: In the equation, the probability of life arising on suitably habitable planets (ones with water, rocky surfaces and atmospheres) is almost always taken to be 100 percent. As the reasoning goes, the same fundamental laws apply to the entire universe, and because those laws engendered the genesis of life on Earth — and relatively early in its history at that — they must readily spawn life elsewhere, too. As the Russian astrobiologist Andrei Finkelstein put it at a recent SETI press conference, “the genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms.” [Read: What If Our Solar System Had Formed Somewhere Else?]

But in a new paper posted on arXiv.org, astrophysicists David Spiegel and Edwin Turner at Princeton University argue that this thinking is dead wrong. … (Life’s Little Mysteries)