Today’s Popular Posts
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Tag Archives: exogenous life
New evidence for liquid water on Mars
The possible seasonal rills of running water on Mars……Credit: NASA, JPL Earth has lots of liquid water, like oceans of it – though salty. Why would people be excited by briny water on Mars? However, for those intrepid, dreaming human beings who think of traveling to Mars and one day pitching camp there, the news [...]
Posted in News: Space Exploration Also tagged brine, carbon dioxide, CRISM, liquid water, Mars, Mars colonies, MRO, NASA, spectrograph Leave a comment
Salt water ocean on Enceladus
It could be called the briny deep, but that might be pushing it a little. Nevertheless, a new study confirming a salty ocean under the icy surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, is significant. Further analysis of data from the Cassini space probe led by researchers at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the University of [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged Cassini, Enceladus, Moon, ocean, salt water, Saturn Leave a comment
NEWS: Short List
Restraining and studying molecules, two at a time – Photonics | The usual way of studying how molecules react to a catalyst is to put them into a solution and observe – typically huge numbers of reactions. This works to a point, the point being the amount of detail that can be surmised from so [...]
Posted in News: Also tagged Agol, Bada, life origin, Miller, nanomedicine, photonics Leave a comment
Mars water: What’s all the fuss?
Seventh in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light, alien planets, the microbiome, cell reprogramming, Martian water, the DNA time machine, cosmology and epigenetics. The original articles are now behind a [...]
Posted in Impact: Exogenous Life Also tagged astrobiology, life, Mars, origin of life, planet, rovers, solar system, water, water-ice Leave a comment
This is the decade: Alien planets, alien life
Fourth in a series of posts inspired by ten topics in ‘Insights of the Decade’ from the December 17, 2010 special issue of Science Magazine The topics are: Inflammation, climatology, tricks of light, alien planets, the microbiome, cell development, Martian water, the DNA time machine, cosmology and epigenetics. The original articles are now behind a [...]
Posted in Impact: Exogenous Life Also tagged adaptive optics, coronagraph, Doppler spectrometry, exoplanet, extra-solar planets, Gliese 581g, Keck Telescope, Kepler, life, planet Leave a comment
Almahata Sitta: A meteorite suggests a new way to form amino acids
Asteroid collision, NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture….credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt Finding amino acids, the building blocks of life, in meteorites is not new. Finding them in a meteorite that is a fragment of an asteroid collision, a piece formed at more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit (1100 degrees Celsius) – now that makes astrobiologists [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged Almahata Sitta, amino acid, asteroid, chirality, Hubble, life origin, meteorite, NASA, proteins Leave a comment
Three-hundred sextillion stars: Who wants to bet against life on other planets?
Life: In part it’s a numbers game. The possibility of life on other planets (or moons, or other space objects) presumably increases with greater numbers. This is the quantitative argument. So, when Yale University (USA) scientists led by Pieter van Dokkum used updated information on the composition of star-types that make up other galaxies than [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged elliptical galaxy, exoplanets, Keck Observatory, Milky Way, red dwarf, sextillion 1 Comment
Mars rover Spirit: Trapped but contributing to water story
Disturbed soil surrounding the Mars rover Spirit…….Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell A heading for this story could be: Dead Spirit reports from a moist grave. Almost technically correct but too much wordplay. The reality is more prosaic and potentially more important. The issue is water on Mars. Evidence is overwhelming that Mars had, as in two billion years [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged geology, Mars, MER, rover, space exploration, Spirit, subsurface, water Leave a comment
Update: Doubts about Gliese 581g
Just last week buzz about discovery of a planet far far away that might have life reverberated beyond the science community into the world at large. SciTechStory: Another Gliese 581 exoplanet most potentially habitable yet SciTechStory: This is an update: Gliese 581g is a fertile temptress The planet, known by the enchanting name Gliese 581g, [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged alien life, exoplanet, Gliese 581g, Goldilocks Zone, HARPS, HIRES, Keck Observatory Leave a comment
Surprises from simulating Titan’s atmosphere
“That can’t be right.” These are terrible or wonderful words for a scientist. It’s that moment when they look at the results of an experiment and see something they truly did not expect, good or bad. It happened to Sarah Hörst, graduate student and lead researcher on a project for the University of Arizona (Tucson, [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged amino acid, astrobiology, atmosphere, nucleotide, prebiotic, Saturn, simulation, Titan Leave a comment
Steven Hawking: Meeting aliens ‘a little too risky’
Steven Hawking, the eminent astrophysicist, declares in a new Discovery Channel series that aliens coming to Earth are not likely to be friendly. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up [...]
Martian lakes may have lingered – life more likely
Over the past decade (roughly) as more visual and on-site evidence has been gathered, it’s become accepted that Mars had a ‘water era,’ a time when liquid water was relatively common on the surface of the planet. Liquid water is now long-gone from the surface and what didn’t escape into the atmosphere is now trapped [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged astrobiology, astrogeology, exobiology, Mars, Mars lakes, Mars water Leave a comment
A new estimate: 15% of solar systems are like Earth’s
Carl Sagan wrote, “The universe is a pretty big space. It’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So, if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space, right?” Perhaps Sagan would be cheered by a new estimate: In our galaxy (the Milky Way) fifteen percent of all solar systems are [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged exoplanets, microlensing, Milky Way, solar system Leave a comment
Another Earth? Will we even remember the planet GJ1214b?
We will (or should) remember the planet GJ1214b if it is, in fact, the first planet we have discovered outside of our solar system to definitely have water. Is it an ‘Earth-like’ planet? No, not really. It has been measured as 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.5 times the mass. That makes it [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged exoplanets, planet, spectrograph, super-Earth, water-ice Leave a comment
Fossil evidence in Mars meteorite revisited, or, IT was LIFE!!!
When the 13,000 year-old Alan Hills (ALH84001) meteorite was first analyzed back in 1996 it caused a sensation. LIFE had existed on Mars!!! The media played the story, of course. Unfortunately, the evidence for fossilized organisms in the meteorite was inconclusive, that is, it could be interpreted in different ways. Most scientists decided that what [...]
Earth bacteria can survive in a least some Mars conditions