Lifeboat Foundation

With today’s news of the first-ever detection of an intact planet closely orbiting a stellar white dwarf, a team led by two Cornell University astronomers has also shown that NASA’s forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be capable of detecting biosignatures from earth-sized planets orbiting such dying stars.

As reported in the journal Nature, the white dwarf in question —- WD 1856+534 —- is now thought to harbor a Jupiter-size object orbiting this dying stellar core on an insanely short orbit of only 34 hours. But even before today’s announcement, Cornell astronomers were testing their idea that the Webb telescope might also be able to detect earth-sized objects within the same system.

In separate research submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Cornell University astronomers Lisa Kaltenegger and Ryan MacDonald and the paper’s 1^st co-authors, lay out their case for using the Webb telescope to look for very short transits of such rocky worlds as they pass in front of the these white dwarfs. They used WD 1856+534, which is only 40 percent larger than Earth and lies only 80 lights years away in the constellation of Draco, as their test case.

Millions of space nerds reacted with joy Monday to a study showing the atmosphere of Venus contains phosphine, a chemical byproduct of biological life. But none would have been more thrilled or less surprised by the discovery than the late, great Carl Sagan — who said this day might come more than 50 years ago.

Now best remembered as the presenter of the most-viewed-ever PBS series Cosmos, the author of the book behind the movie Contact, and the guy who put gold disks of Earth music on NASA’s Voyager missions, Sagan actually got his start studying our closest two planets. He became an astronomer after being inspired as a kid by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ space fantasies, set on Mars and Venus.

‘Cosmos’ presenter Carl Sagan was one of the world’s top experts on Venus, and he saw first what scientists have just announced: possible life on Venus.

This week, astronomers have detected phosphine on Venus- an element that is often associated with living processes here on Earth. As such, in this video, we will talk about how strong of evidence this is for life on Venus and what this means for humanity.

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Venus is suddenly a new hotspot for astrobiology, but its real value may be in what it teaches us about the evolution of life on our own planet.

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Continue reading “Possible signs of alien life discovered on Venus” »

Astronomers have detected a stinky gas on Venus called phosphine, and weirdly enough, it could be a sign of alien life in the planet’s clouds. It’s still too early to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the discovery opens up a lot of questions about what’s happening on Earth’s neighbor.

A sample-return mission to our planetary neighbor should now be considered.

Scientists claim to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite.

Team’s goal is to take the aircraft up into the icy stratosphere to 25km above the Earth.

I’ve felt this might be true for many years. There’s obviously nothing inherently biological about neural networks. It could even explain the development of intelligent life when so many things work against that development — the universe is driven to try to create intelligence — a form of “intelligent design.”

We live inside a neural network, he says, not a simulation — “but we might never know the difference.”