Latest SETI Stories
Touring museum exhibition, produced by Global Experience Specialists, will highlight content from Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA and focus on the search for alien life within and beyond our solar system. KANSAS CITY, Mo. (PRWEB) May 22, 2013 Alien Worlds and Androids, an all-new touring museum exhibition featuring scientific and educational content from Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA, is set to open at Kansas City’s Science Center, Science City, in Union Station Kansas...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Since its launch in 2009 the Kepler spacecraft has identified more than 2,500 planet candidates in our galaxy. Of these, several hundred have been confirmed as planets by ground based observatories. The observatory operates by monitoring stars in our galactic neighborhood and watching for tiny dips in the observed brightness. As the dips are repeated over time, researchers can deduce the presence of planets and even...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online In the search for life beyond Earth scientists face significant challenges. Given the great distances and faint signatures of the alien worlds that we have found, discovering which ones are even potentially habitable is difficult. While the first step is attempting to determine which worlds could maintain liquid water on their surfaces, an equally important factor is characterizing the atmosphere maintained above the...
[ Watch the Video: Ring of Rocky Debris Around a White Dwarf Star ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers spot signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place. Astronomers say they found the planets sitting in the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them, and the researchers say this discovery...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Holy Grail in the search for planets outside our solar system is finding one that could potentially support life. Traditionally, this means finding a planet with features similar to Earth, which is just the right distance from its host star that liquid water could be supported on the surface. Scientists believe the presence of liquid water on the surface is a necessary component for the proliferation of life. And a...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Uwingu announced on Wednesday the launch of the world's first "Adopt-a-Planet" campaign, allowing the public an opportunity to adopt planets. The space company's new open-ended campaign allows the public to adopt exoplanets in astronomical databases through Uwingu's website. The campaign coincides with its other campaign aimed at naming a planet. Uwingu has asked participants to vote on names for exoplanets, which costs money....
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One commonly used method in astronomy is to study spectra and light curves from stars and compare the data to known values, allowing researchers to derive information such as chemical composition, size, and surface temperature. The trouble with this method is it only works on stars that are bright enough or close enough to study in detail. Unfortunately, this precludes nearly three-quarters of the stellar population, which...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A dead star, known as a white dwarf, will eventually cool down and fade away because it has no energy source. A new study led by Professor Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets. The team, which includes Prof. Avi Loeb, Director of Harvard University's Institute for Theory and Computation and a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at TAU,...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A SETI Institute scientist has been chosen to lead the design, development and operations of the data processing center for NASA’s next-generation successor to the Kepler Mission, the Mountain View, California-based organization announced on Friday. Jon M. Jenkins, a senior researcher at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, will oversee operations of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission’s Data...
WASHINGTON, April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and...
Latest SETI Reference Libraries
Image Caption: Artistic concept of a planetary system. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA/JPL-Caltech The term Astronomy encompasses a broad range of topics, including the study of stars, galaxies, and planets. In order to focus on the different areas of study, many subfields of astronomy emerge. One such area is the study of planets known, appropriately, as Planetary Astronomy. Observational Planetary Astronomy Even within the field of Planetary Astronomy, there are several divisions to...
Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer who pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and science in general. He is less well known for his skepticism. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degree (1955) and a master's degree (1956) in physics, before earning his doctorate (1960) in astronomy and astrophysics. He taught at Harvard University...
Xenobiology -- Xenobiology (or exobiology, or astrobiology) is the term for a speculative field within biology which considers the possibility of, and possible nature of, extraterrestrial life. It also necessarily includes the concept of artificial life, since any life form might naturally evolve elsewhere, could conceivably come out of a laboratory using a future technology. It might be difficult to tell whether a truly strange life form had in fact arisen in space, or was designed much...
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) -- SETI (pronounced SEH-tee) stands for for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Interstellar travel is a common theme in science fiction stories, but the obstacles to such journeys are in practice enormous. An alternative approach to interstellar exploration is to survey the sky in hopes of finding transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet, but such an effort has obstacles as well. Overview Visiting another...
Radio Telescope -- In contrast to an ordinary telescope, which produces visible light images, a radio telescope "sees" radio waves emitted by radio sources located anywhere in the Universe, typically by means of a large parabolic ("dish") antenna, or arrays of them. The best-known (and largest) radio telescope is in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. A well-known radio telescope being an array of antennae is the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico. The largest (100-meter diameter) and most...
