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16 hours ago · Throughout its 4.5 billion-year history, Earth has endured numerous mass extinctions, each of which has wiped out more than three-quarters of the planet's species and greatly reduced its ...
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Exoplanets, or planets in solar systems other than our own, sometimes orbit directly between the Earth and their host star. When the planet orbits in front of its star, it blocks a small amount of light. CfA scientists use the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Kepler space telescopes as well as the ground-based robotic telescopes...
Institute for Theory and Computation scientists at the CfA work on identifying the exoplanets that are most likely to harbor life. The orbit must lie in the “habitable zone” where the exoplanet’s surface is just the right temperature for liquid water to exist. Every form of life we know requires liquid water, so an exoplanet too close or too far fr...
The G-CLEF or GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder, a next-generation spectrometer planned for use on the GMT, is our newest tool for measuring the starlight filtered through the atmosphere of an orbiting exoplanet. Using this instrument, scientists will soon be able to measure the chemical composition of a small rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere. Such an ...
NASA. How will we find life? Life might turn up in our own neighborhood: beneath the Martian surface, perhaps, or in the dark, subsurface oceans of Jupiter's moon, Europa. Or maybe the dream of the ages will come true, and we'll eavesdrop on the communications of extraterrestrial civilizations.
Feb 1, 2023 · 19 min read. The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It. Scientists are abandoning conventional thinking to search for extraterrestrial creatures that bear little resemblance...
Jan 12, 2024 · The results suggest our tool can reliably analyze real data from current and future observations to search for alien biosignatures. The measure we adapted from information theory, known as the...
The search for life beyond Earth is really just getting started, but science has an encouraging early answer: there are plenty of planets in the galaxy, many with similarities to our own.
Sep 25, 2018 · Beyond searching for evidence of just microbial life, NASA now is exploring ways to search for life advanced enough to create technology. Technosignatures are signs or signals, which if observed, would allow us to infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe.
