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Sunday, 20 August 2017

New contender in hunt for alien life discovered by astronomers

Exoplanet LHS 1140b is believed to be about 40% larger than Earth and lies 39 light years away in the constellation of Cetus, orbiting a red dwarf star

A rocky planet that orbits a red dwarf star has been revealed as the latest contender for the best place to hunt for life beyond the solar system.

The newfound world was spotted as it crossed the face of its parent star and cast an almost imperceptible shadow that was detected by the MEarth-South observatory in the Chilean desert.

The planet lies 39 light years away and is believed to lurk in the habitable zone where liquid water could support life as we know it around a star named LHS 1140 in the constellation of Cetus, the sea monster.

Jason Dittmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said the new exoplanet, known as LHS 1140b, was the most exciting he had seen in 10 years. We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science: searching for evidence of life beyond Earth, he said.

Astronomers now discover new planets with such frequency that what is considered to be the most promising home for extraterrestrials changes from month to month. In February, scientists spotted seven planets around another star at a similar distance to LHS 1140, a discovery that meant the search for life elsewhere could begin sooner than many thought. Last year, astronomers raised the prospect of life on Proxima b, a planet circling our nearest star a mere four light years away.

What makes LHS 1140b notable is that it is not bombarded with as much high-energy radiation that batters other planets around similar stars. Intense blasts of radiation can strip away tenuous atmospheres and harm any life beneath. In the more hospitable environment on LHS 1140b, a vast magma ocean could have fed steam into the atmosphere, replenishing the planet with water, the scientists said.

Further measurements of the planet by the European Southern Observatory in Chile found the planet to be about 40% larger than Earth, but with seven times the mass, which astronomers believe could be explained by it being rocky with a dense, iron core. Details of the discovery are reported in the journal Nature.

This article was amended on 20 April 2017 to correct lead author Jason Dittmanns name.

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Thursday, 17 August 2017

Alien contact could be 1,500 years away, say Cornell astronomers | Fox News

File photo – The prototype of the Allen Telescope Array, which aims to aims to seek out signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. (Reuters)

If you are hoping to meet an alien then you may be in for a very long wait, according to astronomers at Cornell University.

The experts say that it could be 1,500 years before alien contact with Earth and will present their research at the American Astronomical Societys meeting in San Diego Thursday.

We havent heard from aliens yet, as space is a big place but that doesnt mean no one is out there, said Cornell student Evan Solomonides, who will present the research paper, in a statement.

The astronomers research is based partly on deconstructing the Fermi Paradox described by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, when he noted that aliens have had plenty of time to make contact with Earth. The Cornell experts paired this analysis with the Mediocrity Principle devised by 16^th-century mathematician Copernicus, which says that Earths physical attributes are not unique and that natural processes are likely common throughout the cosmos, so it could take a while for aliens to discover us. The resulting equation gives a 1,500-year estimate for contact.

Its possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now, said Solomonides. Until then, it is possible that we appear to be alone even if we are not. But if we stop listening or looking, we may miss the signals. So we should keep looking.

The research paper A Probabilistic Analysis of the Fermi Paradox is co-authored by Yervant Terzian, Cornells Tisch Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy.

The Cornell researchers explain that extraterrestrials could receive radio and TV signals from Earth, which have been travelling from our planet for the last 80 years. Aliens, however, would likely find these transmissions indecipherable, according to Solomonides, who says they would need to decode the light waves into sounds, then parse 3,000 human languages to interpret the message.

Despite these challenges, the scientists say that Earths broadcast signals have reached every star within about 80 light years from the Sun about 8,531 stars and 3,555 earthlike planets. Our Milky Way galaxy alone contains 200 billion stars, they note.

The astronomers suggest that Earth might encounter an alien civilization when around half of the Milky Way has been signaled in 1,500 years.

This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone, said Solomonides. We simply claim that it is somewhat unlikely that we will not hear anything before that time.

David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the research, told FoxNews.com that the search for alien life is much broader than radio and TV signals, encompassing, for example, the search for artifacts within and beyond our solar system.

The professor used the example of KIC 8462852, a distant dimming star in the constellation Cygnus, which sparked debate about a possible ‘alien megastructure.’

Kipping describes himself as “agnostic” with regard to the possibility of alien life. “We don’t have any evidence right now for extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy,” he said.

Nonetheless, the search for alien life continues to fascinate. In April, for example, celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking joined forces with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and investor Yuri Milner in an ambitious plan for seeking life in outer space.

The $100 million project is aimed at establishing the feasibility of sending a swarm of tiny spacecraft, each weighing far less than an ounce, to the Alpha Centauri star system.

In January the CIA offered a peek into its X-files, shining a spotlight on a series of once-classified UFO documents. The UFO documents, which date primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, are among hundreds that the CIA declassified in 1978.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

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Aliens could conquer Earth by following ‘dangerous’ maps NASA ‘foolishly’ sent into space

Back in the optimistic early days of space exploration, everyone thought it was a great idea to offer aliens a chart telling them how to find Planet Earth.

But now the man who sent four maps into deep space fears this decision could prove to be disastrous.

Frank Drake, an American astronomer and famed alien hunter, worked with Nasa to design maps which were placed inside Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes.

All four of these spaceships have now left the solar system and are speeding through deep space.

The plaque placed aboard the Pioneer craft shows a man and a woman alongside a basic map which plots the position of Earth compared to a distant pulsar stars, which are bright and long-lasting so could still direct aliens our way if they are found millions of years from now.

Voyager was fitted with “golden records”, which can be played to reveal natural sounds and even images from Earth.

A similar pulsar map is engraved on the front of the records.

Frank Drake now fears it may have been a bad idea to send the maps into space.

Responding to a request for comment by Fox News, a NASA spokesperson said: “[T]he so-called Golden Records are unlikely to be found anytime soon, as space is largely empty and the Voyagers will not be encountering any other planets or stars in our lifetimes.”

“In those days, all the people I dealt with were optimists, and they thought the ETs would be friendly,” Drake told National Geographic.

“Nobody thought, even for a few seconds, about whether this might be a dangerous thing to do.”

The article about Drake was actually written by his daughter Nadia, who asked whether it may one day be seen as “foolish and dangerous” to have broadcasted details of our whereabouts to aggressive aliens.

Many scientists now believe contacting extraterrestrials is a spectacularly bad idea.

Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned that “meeting an advanced civilisation could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus“.

“That didnt turn out so well,” he said. He claimed alien life could be “rapacious marauders roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder, and planets to conquer and colonize.

This story has been updated with NASA’s comment.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

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Mining complex on the moon? UFO hunter claims structures visible on lunar surface

A UFO hunter claims to have spotted a mining complex on the surface of the Moon.

Streetcap 1, which posts extraterrestrial-related and other paranormal videos on its YouTube page, purports a series of objects in a video could be a mining complex on the lunar surface.

In the video, Streetcap 1 says: “Can you see those buildings? They are in Tycho Crater on the moon. That’s quite amazing isn’t it?”

GIANT HOLE ON MARS COULD BE WORK OF ALIENS, RESEARCHERS SAY

Below is the video in its entirety:

Commenters on the video, which has over 5,000 views, seemed to agree with the findings. “Nice find mate,” Thomas Mundt wrote.

Another commenter, Kristin Bacon, wrote: “[T]his is a great pic. definitely something going on. no one can say that dosnt look like a mining complex of some sort. i would love to go to the moon and look around lol”

A third commenter, going by the name of Clint Steel, wrote: “I do believe there are structures on the moon but what i think is happening here is pixelization of some kind with any white patches on the surface. The pixelization is even subtly there on the darker areas. Can you show us a white patch that doesnt pixelize like this?”

This latest video, which was published on July 29, is the latest in a series of videos from Streetcap 1 about unexplained anomalies on the Moon.

ALIEN SHIPS NEAR SATURN? EX-NASA SCIENTIST CLAIMS OF THEIR EXISTENCE

Others have also purportedly found inanimate objects on the lunar surface, though none have ever been proven.

In May, UFO researcher SecureTeam 10 claimed to have spotted an “alien tank” on the surface of the Moon.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

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Spacecraft discovers possibility of alien life, then runs out of fuel

Scientists say discovery of ingredients for life on Saturns moon Enceladus is bittersweet as spacecraft prepares to end 20-year mission

Could there be life in our own solar system?

This is the question posed by the discovery of hydrogen gas erupting in plumes from Saturns moon Enceladus, indicating the likely existence of an energy supply for microbial life.

The presence of hydrogen, detected by the Cassini spacecraft and announced by Nasa on Thursday, is seen as tantalising evidence that in the ocean beneath the moons icy surface chemical reactions are taking place that are strikingly similar to those that occur at hydrothermal vents on the Earths ocean floors.

In the fissures of the Earths oceans, a process called serpentinisation produces hydrogen when salty water reacts with hot rocks. This is what allows microbes, which use hydrogen as a source of chemical energy, to thrive in the ocean depths, raising the question of whether equivalent biology might have emerged on Enceladus.

Although we cant detect life, weve found that theres a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes, said Hunter Waite, programme director for the space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and lead author of the Cassini study.

Based on the observed concentration of the hydrogen in the plumes, scientists calculate that the hydrothermal activity on Enceladus produces more than enough energy to sustain a hypothetical colony of alien microbes.

Enceladus is a mysterious enigmatic object that now shows it has all of the ingredients for life, which is why scientists are so jazzed about the discovery, said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT. Hydrogen gas sets up a way for life to extract energy from chemistry a main way microbes exploit energy to live here on Earth.

However, the discovery of an available food source poses a new puzzle: why, if something is alive on Enceladus, is it not consuming all the available fuel? The surplus of hydrogen could be an indication of the absence of life, or of a very inactive microbe lurking in the oceans depths.

Until 11 years ago, Saturns tiny moon, with a diameter about the length of England, was regarded as an unremarkable object. But then Cassini discovered plumes coming from its south pole, indicating the presence of liquid water, often the first item on the checklist when seeking out the places in the universe that might host life.

Since then, scientists have ticked off some of the other chemical elements thought to be required carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and now hydrogen (the other two, phosphorus and sulphur, have yet to be detected but are almost certainly present).

Prof Andrew Coates, a Cassini scientist based at University College Londons Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: There are four things you need for life: liquid water, the right chemistry, a source of energy, and enough time for life to develop. This gives that chemical imbalance, that gives you a source of energy.

As Saturn moves in its orbit, the plumes have been observed to vary in intensity and it is not known whether conditions would have been stable enough for a chain of reactions leading to the emergence of life to occur uninterrupted. On Earth, it took millions of years after favourable conditions appeared for life to spark into existence. We dont know if there has been enough time or not on Enceladus, said Coates.

With the first three of the four prerequisites ticked off, Coates now considers Enceladus, along with Jupiters moon Europa, to be the most likely place in the solar system to discover microbial life today.

Coates describes this as a bittersweet realisation. The results, frustratingly, come just as Cassini is running out of fuel after 20 years in space. In September, Cassini will pass through the inner edge of the ring system and plunge into Saturns atmosphere where the probe will be vaporised in what Nasa describes as the missions grand finale. With no Saturn missions scheduled, it will be at least a decade before another Enceladus flyby, let alone a landing.

The great mystery of whether humans are alone in the universe and what other lifeforms might look like from basic microbes to advanced civilisations remains out of reach for now. But Cassinis findings add to scientists growing confidence that there are places beyond Earth where life might find a viable home and that some of them are probably within reach of a spacecraft.

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Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Alien megastructure? Dimming star may have less exotic explanation | Fox News

Cascading comets around a distant star. (NASA/JPL/CaltechNASA/JPL/Caltech)

A mysterious darkening star might not be home to an alien megastructure after all. Instead, the dimming that apparently occurred over the course of a century may actually have resulted from how telescopes and cameras have changed over time, researchers said.

Last fall, a star named KIC 8462852 made news when scientists found unusual fluctuations in the object’s light. The star is an otherwise-ordinary F-type star, slightly larger and hotter than Earth’s sun; it sits about 1,480 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

But astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian of Yale University in Connecticut and her colleagues, along with citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program, found something odd. They discovered dozens of strange instances of the star darkening over a 100-day period when they analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

The dimming events blocked up to 22 percent of the light from KIC 8462852, now nicknamed “Tabby’s Star,” making these events far too substantial to be caused by planets crossing (or “transiting”) the star’s face. Scientists also ruled out several other possible explanations, such as an enormous dust cloud.

Such analyses raised the possibility that astronomers had detected signs of alien life specifically, a Dyson sphere, a megastructure built around a star to capture as much of the sun’s energy as possible to power an advanced civilization. (In science fiction, Dyson spheres which are named after mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson are often depicted as solid shells around stars, but they could also be spherical swarms of giant solar panels.)

So far, astronomers at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institutein California analyzing Tabby’s Starwith the Allen Telescope Array have not detected any radio signals that would indicate the presence of an alien civilization. Scientists at SETI International in San Francisco and their colleagues have also failed to detect any laser signals from Tabby’s Star.

Still, in January, astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University reviewed archived photographic plates of the sky taken from 1890 to 1989 and found signs that Tabby’s Star had dimmed by about 20 percent over the past century. He noted that this finding was difficult to explain by natural means. For instance, Schaefer calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each about 125 miles wide, passing by the star in the past century to cause such dimming.

Now, however, researchers suggest this seemingly century-long dimming trend might not be real. Instead, the apparent darkening may just be due to how astronomical instruments have changed over time.

In the new study, scientists pored over DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) data. This is a collection of more than 500,000 photographic glass plates taken by astronomers at Harvard in Massachusetts between 1885 and 1993 that the university is digitizing.

“It is exciting that we have these century-old data, which are incredibly valuable for checks like this,” study lead author Michael Hippke, an amateur astronomer from the German town of Neukirchen-Vluyn, told Space.com.

The researchers looked not only at Tabby’s Star, but also at a number of comparable stars in the DASCH database. Results showed that many of these other stars experienced a drop in brightness similar to that of Tabby’s Star in the 1960s.

“That indicates the drops were caused by changes in the instrumentation, not by changes in the stars’ brightness,” study co-author Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said in a statement.

“Now, what does that mean for the mystery? Are there no aliens after all? Probably not,” Hippke said in an email. “Still, the daylong dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star, and we still have no idea what it is.”

The best explanation so far for this dimming may be that a giant comet fragmented into thousands of smaller comets that are now crossing in front of Tabby’s Star, some scientists say. To help solve this celestial mystery, amateur astronomers around the world are working with the American Association of Variable Star Observers to find new dips in the star’s brightness, Hippke noted. Other groups, such as the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope, have also joined the effort, he said.

“Observing further dips in different colors can reveal information about the chemistry of the transiting object, which might confirm or reject a cometary origin,” Hippke said.

The scientists will detail their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

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Student petition at Dartmouth sparks Library of Congress to drop term ‘illegal alien’

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

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