alien life

Planet Hunters Seek New Ways to Detect Alien Life

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Astrobiologists debate which chemical signatures would hint at life on other worlds

This artist’s conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

In the search for life beyond Earth, false alarms abound. Researchers have generally considered, and rejected, claims ranging from a 1970s report of life on Mars to the 1990s ‘discovery’ of fossilized space microbes in a meteorite.

Now, inspired by the detection of thousands of planets beyond the Solar System, NASA has started a fresh effort to learn how to recognize extraterrestrial life. The goal is to understand what gases alien life might produce—and how Earth-bound astronomers might detect such ‘biosignatures’ in light passing through the atmospheres of planets trillions of kilometres away (see ‘Searching for alien life’).

The agency will convene a workshop this week in Seattle, Washington, with the ultimate goal of advising a NASA exoplanet group on how to avoid embarrassing errors in the future. “We have to come together and determine what good evidence of life on another planet could be,” says Shawn Domagal-Goldman, one of the workshop’s organizers and an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The exercise comes at a crucial time, as astronomers grapple with how to interpret exoplanet data from the next generation of telescopes. Some scientists are working to understand how nature could produce archetypal biosignature gases, such as oxygen, in the absence of living organisms. Others are trying to think as expansively as possible about the types of biochemistry that could sustain life.

“We could fool ourselves into thinking a lifeless planet has life—or we could be missing life because we don’t really understand the context of what could be produced on another planet,” says Sarah Rugheimer, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Detecting a biosignature gas is just the first step to understanding what could be happening on an exoplanet. Each world has its own combination of physical and chemical factors that may or may not lead to life, says Victoria Meadows, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Planets are hard, and we shouldn’t think they are all going to be the same or reveal their secrets very easily,” she says.

A planet’s environment is key. Some Earth-sized planets orbit M dwarf stars—the most common type of star in the Galaxy—at the right distance to harbour liquid water. But Meadows’ collaborators have shown that photo-chemical reactions can send water into the planet’s atmosphere and then break off its hydrogen, which escapes into space. What’s left is a thick blanket of oxygen that might seem as if it came from living organisms, but results from a run-away greenhouse effect.

There are ways to tell. The runaway greenhouse would create an atmosphere thousands of times denser than Earth’s, in which O2 molecules collide to produce O4. So spotting O4 in a planet’s atmosphere could be a clue that the oxygen does not, in fact, come from life, Meadows’ team reported this year.

Another method is to draw up a list of alternative biosignature gases—things not as obvious as oxygen that might be made by organisms under certain conditions. These include dimethyl sulfide, which is produced by Earthly phytoplankton, or even ammonia. On a cold alien planet, organisms might make the gas using the same chemical process as industrial manufacturers.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, astronomer Sara Seager has begun to examine 14,000 compounds that are stable enough to exist in a planetary atmosphere. She and her colleagues are winnowing down their initial list of molecules using criteria such as whether there are geophysical ways to send the compound into the atmosphere.

“We’re doing a triage process,” says Seager. “We don’t want to miss anything.”

The Seattle meeting aims to compile a working list of biosignature gases and their chemical properties. The information will feed into how astronomers analyse data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The telescope will be able to look at only a handful of habitable planets, but it will provide the first detailed glimpse of what gases surround which world, says Nikole Lewis, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

No single gas is likely to be a slam-dunk indicator of alien life. But Domagal-Goldman hopes that the workshop will produce a framework for understanding where scientists could trip themselves up. “We don’t want to have a great press release,” he says, “and then a week later have egg on everybody’s faces.”

NASA Openly Admits Alien Life Exists: Get Ready for Disclosure!

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Most people ‘in the know’ realize that NASA is just part of the military industrial complex, but a recent open admission on mainstream news that “there are indications of alien life” is likely the beginning of a bid to get your undivided attention before full-forced disclosure ensues.

Most people already believe what NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan states:

“I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade . . .I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20-30 years.”

It isn’t going to take that long if we open our eyes.

Stofan goes on to say:

“We’re on the verge of things that people have wondered about for millennia. Within all of our lifetimes we’re going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system. We’re going to understand the implications of that for life here on Earth.”

What we’re going to understand is that our ‘secret’ government has been hiding this fact for ages. In an effort to transition the US and other countries through its reach to a cabal-run oligarchy, our shadow government has been lying about off-planet corporate slavery rings, alien abductions, benevolent beings who can only do so much until our collective consciousness elevates, and much, much more.

William Cooper, among others, tried to disclose the true purpose of NASA, but he was exterminated. His death, among thousands of others, will not be in vain.

We will learn that aside from extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet and many different ET races tinkering with our DNA over millenia, there are ancient humanoid races that are more than 10 million years old.

We will learn that a recent computer hacking retrieved millions of government and corporate personnel records, some say as part of documentation for Nuremburg-like trials, will begin soon against those who have mind-controlled, enslaved and tortured us. Undeniable photos of UFOs were also unearthed.

We will also learn that chemtrails and GMOs were the LEAST of plans made for us ‘sheeple’ and ‘useless eaters’ by a Luciferian cabal, and that President Harry Truman signed a document with certain ETs that allowed the ‘elite’ to conduct highly technological experiments with intelligence gained from these ETs in exchange for looking the other way when certain humans were abducted for ET experiments.

We will learn that we are not helpless, as we have been programmed to believe. We are, in fact, a rare humanoid race that has an incredible range of emotion and creative power. We will learn that our minds and emotions can either fuel chaos on this planet, or restore it to its rightful place of peace and cooperation, of care for others at least as much as ourselves.

We will learn that our ascension into infinitely peaceful beings is indeed possible, and it has been described in countless books, many of which have been suppressed along with UFO information.

NASA is telling us now that the likelihood of alien life is a ruse. Be sure to remember those who have been executed to try to prove this information to us decades ago, and to use discernment when the truth is finally revealed.

Watch the video. discussion. URL:https://youtu.be/2a3IXw1nGCw

Starshot scientist says we won’t find alien life on planets

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Physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner are teaming up with a host of other physics and cosmology luminaries to plan a mission to Alpha Centauri, a star far beyond our own solar system that will take at least two decades to reach if they can make their experimental technology work.

They hope to send miniature robots, smaller than iPhones, to explore the faraway depths of the Milky Way and search for signs of life.

The project, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, was made public on April 12.

At the official announcement, the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson told the assembled crowd that while Starshot’s destination would be Alpha Centauri, what these robots find along the way may be even more interesting.

“The space between here and Alpha Centauri is not empty … there are thousands of objects in between,” he said. “We know that there are billions of planets [in our galaxy] … but we also know that there are trillions of comets and asteroids.”

And he predicts that our focus on planets may have obscured something truly exciting: Some of these smaller objects might be teeming with life.

“I’ve always believed that planets are not the big thing,” he said. “I’ve made a bet that when the first alien life is discovered, it will not be on a planet.”

atacama desert starsesoastronomy/Flickr

This idea is not entirely new. Scientists recently claimed that there was evidence of potential alien life on the comet Philae, but those claims turned out to be unfounded.

Still, it’s entirely possible that life on Earth originated thanks to meteors that pummeled our planet with the elements required for life. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to believe that similar bodies are not still out there. A theory called panspermia suggests that it’s comets and asteroids that spread the building blocks for life all around the universe.

If the Starshot initiative is able to get off the ground, it may not tell us anything for certain about the origins of life on our own planet. But it could provide tantalizing clues about whether alien life is hiding on rocks hurtling across the sky.

The telescope big enough to spot signs of alien life on other planets .

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Engineers are about to blast away the top of a Chilean mountain to create a site for the European Extremely Large Telescope. It will allow us, for the first time, to directly observe planets outside the solar system
An artist's impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).

An artist’s impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).

Cerro Armazones is a crumbling dome of rock that dominates the parched peaks of the Chilean Coast Range north of Santiago. A couple of old concrete platforms and some rusty pipes, parts of the mountain’s old weather station, are the only hints that humans have ever taken an interest in this forbidding, arid place. Even the views look alien, with the surrounding boulder-strewn desert bearing a remarkable resemblance to the landscape of Mars.

Dramatic change is coming to Cerro Armazones, however – for in a few weeks, the 10,000ft mountain is going to have its top knocked off. “We are going to blast it with dynamite and then carry off the rubble,” says engineer Gird Hudepohl. “We will take about 80ft off the top of the mountain to create a plateau – and when we have done that, we will build the world’s biggest telescope there.”

Given the peak’s remote, inhospitable location that might sound an improbable claim – except for the fact that Hudepohl has done this sort of thing before. He is one of the European Southern Observatory’s most experienced engineers and was involved in the decapitation of another nearby mountain, Cerro Paranal, on which his team then erected one of the planet’s most sophisticated observatories.

The Paranal complex has been in operation for more than a decade and includes four giant instruments with eight-metre-wide mirrors – known as the Very Large Telescopes or VLTs – as well as control rooms and a labyrinth of underground tunnels linking its instruments. More than 100 astronomers, engineers and support staff work and live there. A few dozen metres below the telescopes, they have a sports complex with a squash court, an indoor football pitch, and a luxurious 110-room residence that has a central swimming pool and a restaurant serving meals and drinks around the clock. Built overlooking one of the world’s driest deserts, the place is an amazing oasis. (See box.)

Now the European Southern Observatory, of which Britain is a key member state, wants Hudepohl and his team to repeat this remarkable trick and take the top off Cerro Armazones, which is 20km distant. Though this time they will construct an instrument so huge it will dwarf all the telescopes on Paranal put together, and any other telescope on the planet. When completed, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and its 39-metre mirror will allow astronomers to peer further intospace and look further back into the history of the universe than any other astronomical device in existence. Its construction will push telescope-making to its limit, however. Its primary mirror will be made of almost 800 segments – each 1.4 metres in diameter but only a few centimetres thick – which will have to be aligned with microscopic precision.

It is a remarkable juxtaposition: in the midst of utter desolation, scientists have built giant machines engineered to operate with smooth perfection and are now planning to top this achievement by building an even more vast device. The question is: for what purpose? Why go to a remote wilderness in northern Chile and chop down peaks to make homes for some of the planet’s most complex scientific hardware?

The answer is straightforward, says Cambridge University astronomer Professor Gerry Gilmore. It is all about water. “The atmosphere here is as dry as you can get and that is critically important. Water molecules obscure the view from telescopes on the ground. It is like trying to peer through mist – for mist is essentially a suspension of water molecules in the air, after all, and they obscure your vision. For a telescope based at sea level that is a major drawback.

“However, if you build your telescope where the atmosphere above you is completely dry, you will get the best possible views of the stars – and there is nowhere on Earth that has air drier than this place. For good measure, the high-altitude winds blow in a smooth, laminar manner above Paranal – like slabs of glass – so images of stars remain remarkably steady as well.”

The view of the heavens here is close to perfect, in other words – as an evening stroll around the viewing platform on Paranal demonstrates vividly. During my visit, the Milky Way hung over the observatory like a single white sheet. I could see the four main stars of the Southern Cross; Alpha Centauri, whose unseen companion Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system; the two Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way; and the Coalsack, an interstellar dust cloud that forms a striking silhouette against the starry Milky Way. None are visible in northern skies and none appear with such brilliance anywhere else on the planet.

Hence the decision to build this extraordinary complex of VLTs. At sunset, each one’s housing is opened and the four great telescopes are brought slowly into operation. Each machine is made to rotate and swivel, like football players stretching muscles before a match. Each housing is the size of a block of flats. Yet they move in complete silence, so precise is their engineering.

Building the four VLTs, which have been named Antu (Sun), Kueyen (Moon), Melipal (Southern Cross) and Yepun (Venus) in the language of Mapuche people of Chile, was a formidable challenge, needless to say. Each has a giant mirror that is 8.2 metres in diameter but only 17cm thick: any thicker, and the mirror would be too heavy to move and point. Such thinness leaves the mirrors liable to deform as temperatures and air pressure fluctuate, however, and so each has 150 actuators fitted to its unpolished side. These push the mirrors to keep them within a few billionths of a centimetre of their proper shape. In addition, ESO astronomers use a laser-based system known as adaptive optics to measure turbulence in the upper atmosphere and to change each telescope’s internal mirror configuration to compensate for any disturbance they can measure.

The result is a cluster of astronomical devices of incredible power and flexibility, one that has been involved in an astonishing number of critically important discoveries and observations over the past decade, as ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut explains. “Perhaps the VLT’s most spectacular achievement was its tracking of stars at the centre of the Milky Way. Astronomers followed them as they revolved around… nothing. Eventually they were able to show that something incredibly small and dark and massive lay at the centre of this interstellar waltz. This was the first time, we now know, that scientists had directly observed the effect of the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of our galaxy.”

The Milky Way seen from the Paranal Observatory in Chile.The Milky Way seen from the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Photograph: National Geographic Image Collec/Alamy

The VLTs also played a key role in providing observations which showed, from the behaviour of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating thanks to the action of a force now known as dark energy. This discovery later won Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess the 2011 Nobel prize for physics. And in 2004 the telescopes were used to make a direct observation of an exoplanet – a planet that orbits around a star other than our Sun. It was another astronomical first. Until then scientists had only been able to infer the existence of exoplanets from the way they affected the movement of their parent star or its light output. “This was history-book material, a discovery of the same quality as Galileo’s drawings of the mountains on the moon or the satellites of Jupiter,” says Hainaut.

These discoveries have only whetted astronomers’ appetites for more, however. Hence the decision to build the £800m E-ELT – whose British funding will come through a £88m investment from the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council. Engineers have now completed a road to the mountain from Paranal and on 16 June are set to begin blasting to remove the top from Cerro Armazones. Then they will start to build the E-ELT using 798 hexagonal pieces of mirror to create a mammoth device that will be able to collect a hundred million times more light than the human eye. When completed in around 2025, the 2,700-tonne telescope will be housed in a 74 metre high dome and operated by astronomers working 20kms away in Paranal. It will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky.

An indication of the E-ELT’s potential is provided by ESO astronomer Linda Schmidtobreick. “There are fundamental issues that only a telescope the size of the E-ELT can resolve,” she says. “Its mirror will have a surface area 10 times bigger than any other telescope, which means it will take a 10th of the time to collect the same amount of light – ie the same number of photons – from an object compared with these other instruments.”

RobinThe astronomers’ residence: ‘As accommodation goes, it’s as exotic as you can get.’

For Schmidtobreick, this ability to collect light quickly is crucial to her research. She studies stars known as cataclysmic variables: pairs of stars in which one is pulling vast amounts of gas, mainly hydrogen, from its companion, a process that can trigger gigantic thermonuclear eruptions, sometimes within 30 seconds or so. “With current instruments, it can take minutes or hours to collect light from these objects, which is too long to resolve what is happening,” says Schmidtobreick. “But with the E-ELT, we will be able to study many, many more cataclysmic variables because we will be able to collect significant amounts of light from them in seconds rather than minutes or hours and so will be to resolve their behaviour.”

Simone Zaggia, of the Inaf Observatory of Padua, is another frequent visitor to Paranal and has a very different reason for backing the E-ELT. He believes it will play a vital role in the hunt for exoplanets – in particular, exoplanets that are Earth-like and which could support life. “At present, our biggest telescopes can only spot really big exoplanets, giants that are as big as Jupiter and Saturn,” he says.

“But we really want to know about the smaller worlds that make up the solar systems in our galaxy. In other words, we want to find out if there are many Earth-like planets in our part of the universe. More importantly we want to find out if their atmospheres contain levels of oxygen or carbon dioxide or methane or other substances that suggest there is life there. To do that, we need a giant telescope like the E-ELT.”

This point is backed by Gilmore. “We can see exoplanets but we cannot study them in detail because – from our distant perspective – they appear so close to their parent stars. However, the magnification which the E-ELT will provide will mean we will be able to look at them directly and clearly. In 15 years, we should have a picture of a planet around another star and that picture could show its surface changing colour just as Earth does as the seasons change – indicating that vegetation exists on that world. We will then have found alien life.”

Astronomers’ amazing home

A walk down the alleyway that leads from Paranal observatory’s entrance gate into its astronomers’ residence produces one of the most striking changes in surroundings you can experience in a few footsteps. Outside the air is parched and the ground bleached by sunlight from a sky that is hardly ever troubled by clouds. Push through the double swing doors and you enter a rainforest – and a path that leads down through towering ferns and tropical plants until you reach a swimming pool in the residence’s lowest level. As accommodation goes, it’s as exotic as you can get – though hedonism was far from the minds of the architects when they designed it.

To battle the arid conditions of the air at 8,600ft-high Paranal, they wanted a way to keep it moist and fresh for the scientists staying there. The answer was a swimming pool and an indoor tropical garden that is constantly watered with supplies imported by trucks from the coast every day. Moist air from the pool and garden then circulates around the rest of the residence. The result is a building that is remarkably airy and light – until 7pm when, every night, all openings and windows, including the vast glass dome over the pool, are closed and shuttered automatically to prevent any chink of light from affecting observations made on the mountain top.

The scale and style of Paranal and its residence is extraordinary and movie producers have fallen over themselves in their attempts to film it. Most have been turned down – with the exception of the 2008 Bond film,Quantum of Solace, whose final scenes were filmed here. (In contrast the last X-Men film was turned down flat because its producers wanted to fly helicopters near the observatory’s precious telescope complex.) Given the vast cost of building and running Paranal, filming was not allowed to disturb its tight observing schedule. “I was woken up by the sound of someone repeatedly jumping on to the balcony in the room next to mine,” one astronomer recalls. “It turned out to be the actress Olga Kurylenko – who plays the film’s heroine Camille. It was quite a shock. I mean you don’t get that sort thing happening at other observatories.”

‘Sirius’ Documentary Reveals DNA Test Results On Ata, The ‘6-Inch Alien’.

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r-ATAHUMANOID-large570The mummified remains of what looks like a 6-inch space alien has turned “Sirius” into the most eagerly awaited documentary among UFO enthusiasts.

The findings, however, might come as a disappointment.

In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn’t be medically classified.

In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human — closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,”said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University‘s School of Medicine in California.

“The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human,” Nolan, who performed the DNA tests, explains in the film.

“Sirius” focuses on the remains of the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, that was discovered in Chile‘s Atacama Desert 10 years ago and has, literally, gone through different hands and ownership since then.

The film also explores an ongoing grassroots movement to get the U.S. government to reveal what it reportedly knows about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the availability of advanced alternative energy technologies that could greatly benefit everyone on Earth.

The primary force behind “Sirius” is Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) andThe Disclosure Project.

One odd thing about the Ata controversy is how it came to the recent attention of the American public.

Early in the documentary, Greer refers to Ata as an extraterrestrial being, explaining how it was found in the Atacama Desert and “we don’t know how it came about.” That seems strange because HuffPost recently reported on the well known history of little Ata since its discovery 10 years ago and subsequent moving from hand to hand, ending up in Spain.

Early PR for “Sirius” referred to the “paradigm shifting physical evidence of a medically and scientifically analyzed DNA sequenced humanoid creature of unknown classification.” This fueled rumors, speculation and more than likely, the hope many people had that, finally, a real alien creature had been discovered and proven to have non-human DNA.

But now that the film is available to everybody, and DNA analysis shows that Ata was human, was that early PR hype about the humanoid a bit premature?

“My interest, frankly, is to disprove that it’s anything unusual or anything paranormal,” Nolan said prior to beginning his DNA study of the small portions of Ata he was allowed to work with. “I would like to prove that this is human [and] just an interesting mutation. In every situation with scientists, your reputation’s at stake. I have every expectation that even doing this is going to lead to some ribbing from some of my colleagues.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

ScienceNOW – Up to the minute news from Science Outcast Planets Could Support Life

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If aliens exist, where are they? Many astronomers look to the nearest stars, in the hope that they harbor a warm, wet planet like Earth. But now a pair of researchers believe extraterrestrial life could exist on a rogue planet that has been ejected from its birthplace.

Astronomers have never spotted a rogue planet with certainty, but computer simulations suggest that our galaxy could be teeming with them. Slingshotted out of their planetary system by the gravity of a bigger planet, these lone worlds zoom far from their parent suns, slowly freezing in the cold of outer space. Any water fit for life would freeze, too. Yet in a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, planetary scientists Dorian Abbot and Eric Switzer of the University of Chicago in Illinois suggest that a rogue planet could support a hidden ocean under its blanket of ice, kept warm by geothermal activity.

They call such a world a Steppenwolf planet after a novel by the German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, because “any life … would exist like a lone wolf wandering the galactic steppe.” If Steppenwolf planets do exist, there’s a chance that some of them could be lurking in space between Earth and nearby stars. If so, they might be a more realistic human destination for the search of alien life than another planetary system, which would be at least several light-years away. There is even a chance—albeit very small—that a Steppenwolf planet crashing into our solar system billions of years ago was the origin of life on Earth.

Abbot and Switzer came to their conclusion by simulating an isolated planet between 1/10th and 10 times the size of Earth. By comparing the rate at which heat would be lost through an ice shell with the rate at which heat would be produced by geothermal activity, they calculated that a planet with Earth’s composition of rock and water but three times as big would generate enough heat to maintain a hidden ocean. If the planet had much more water than Earth, say Abbot and Switzer, it would need to be only about a third as big as our planet. “Several kilometers of water ice make an excellent blanket that could be sufficient to support liquid water at its base,” says Switzer.

The Chicago researchers are not the first to consider the possibility of liquid water on rogue planets. In 1999, planetary scientist David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, calculated that liquid water could exist if a planet had a dense atmosphere of hydrogen—so dense that a greenhouse effect would trap warmth on the surface without the need for ice. But Abbot thinks the new result is more surprising because they are considering a more generic planet, without an extraordinary atmosphere.

“This is certainly an interesting study regarding the extent of the possible locations where life could arise, or be sustained, in the universe,” says David Ehrenreich, a planetary scientist at the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France. “However, it will certainly be very difficult to actually detect life on such a world, since it would be buried under an ice shell.”

Switzer admits detection would be difficult. An astronomer would need to spot a Steppenwolf planet by looking for its infrared emission to see if it is as warm as he and Abbot predict. But at present, even the best observatories could detect rogue planets only within about 100 billion miles of Earth—not a huge distance in astronomical terms—and Switzer says the probability of a Steppenwolf planet existing in this range is just one in a billion.

Still, as planetary scientist Gaetano Di Achille of the University of Colorado, Boulder, points out, that might mean that the first occupied planet humans set foot on is not in another planetary system, but in the lonely depths of outer space. “If the hypothesis of oceans on rogue planets is correct, we will certainly have to expand the inventory of places with a high potential for life,” he says.

source: science now