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Category: alien life – Page 46

The Golden Age of Space Exploration

In the next two decades, human beings will return to the moon, set foot on Mars, and launch telescopes capable of detecting extraterrestrial life. NASA’s outgoing head scientist Thomas Zurbuchen oversaw much of the planning for these projects, and space agencies around the world are pursuing similar goals collaboratively. Brian Greene is joined by Zurbuchen, Japan’s Masaki Fujimoto, Europe’s Kirsten MacDonnell and Australia’s Aude Vignelles, as they reveal their plans for what promises to be a New Golden Age of Space Exploration.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

The live program was presented at the 2023 World Science Festival Brisbane, hosted by the Queensland Museum.

Participants:
Masaki Fujimoto.
Kirsten MacDonell.
Aude Vignelles.
Thomas Zurbuchen.

Moderator:
Brian Greene.

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Drones take to the waves: Saildrones are getting data where people can’t

Science fiction often paints a terrifying picture of the future—think aliens decimating humanity, à la The War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becoming the present can be pretty amazing—who doesn’t love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?

Or take Earth’s oceans, which are currently in the middle of a technological revolution that, outside of some very nerdy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.

“We’re at the cusp of a proliferation of lots of autonomous vehicles in the ocean,” said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Things that were science fiction not so long ago are kind of routine now.” That includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard, carbon-fiber sail (called a wing) and a stash of scientific equipment.

Is it possible for aliens to detect humans on Earth via signal leakages?

For centuries, scientists have been involved in studies and research to detect signals of extraterrestrial life or aliens on other planets, resulting in the detection of strange noises and sightings, but have you ever wondered about the possibility of the situation being reversed?

Researchers believe that for extraterrestrials to detect radio signal leaks from Earth, they would need to be technologically more advanced than humans, according to a new study reported by The Independent.

The experts predicted what extraterrestrial life would see on Earth from as close as six light years away by simulating the radio signal leakage from cell towers.

Could Milky Way’s core harbour advanced alien life?

A new effort to detect extraterrestrial life will listen for radio pulses coming from the galactic nucleus. Pulsars, which are stars that naturally emit narrow-frequency pulses, are also intentionally used by humans in technology like radar.

These pulses are a useful means of communication over great distances and a desirable target to listen for when looking for extraterrestrial civilisations because they stand out against the ambient radio noise of space.

A recent study that was released on May 30 in The Astronomical Journal by researchers described their approach to looking for alien life.

Key building block for life found at Saturn’s moon Enceladus

The search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system just got more exciting. A team of scientists including Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Christopher Glein has discovered new evidence that the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus contains a key building block for life. The team directly detected phosphorus in the form of phosphates originating from the moon’s ice-covered global ocean using data from NASA’s Cassini mission. Cassini explored Saturn and its system of rings and moons for over 13 years.

“In 2020 (published in 2022), we used geochemical modeling to predict that phosphorus should be abundant in Enceladus’ ,” said Glein, a leading expert in extraterrestrial oceanography. He is a co-author of a paper in the journal Nature describing this research. “Now, we have found abundant phosphorus in plume ice samples spraying out of the subsurface ocean.”

The Cassini spacecraft discovered Enceladus’ subsurface liquid water and analyzed samples in a plume of ice grains and gases erupting into space from cracks in the moon’s icy surface. Analysis of a class of salt-rich ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer showed the presence of sodium phosphates. The team’s observational results, together with laboratory analogue experiments, suggest that phosphorus is readily available in Enceladus’ ocean as phosphates.