Haunting the Web Since 1999
By way of Eric of Kestrel’s Nest, our radio telescopes find signs of life on Mars…us. Hey, at least the system works. Although, does anyone else have a problem with UNC-Chapel Hill calling their robotic telescope network SKYNET? Inviting calamity, I say.
And we know exactly whose fault it is. In response to the 35-year-old “WOW signal“, we the people of Earth have apparently chosen as our herald Stephen Colbert, whose response above will be broadcast in the direction of its origin by National Geographic via the Arecibo radio telescope.
Hrm….isn’t the Mighty Colbert a bit too droll for alien intelligences? I fear this will set off a Douglas Adams-style miscommunication that will end very badly for all parties involved. Second, why would any alien race be able to make sense of Prometheus? There was no sense there to be had.
From a few weeks ago and languishing in the bookmarks, scientists find nematodes a mile below the Earth’s surface, raising the possibility of similar life on other worlds. The spice must flow… “The two lead researchers…said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding ‘Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.‘”
Another casualty of the lousy economy and the budget crises (in this case, California’s) SETI’s Allen Telescope Array goes dark. “‘We have the radio antennae up, but we can’t run them without operating funds,’ he added. ‘Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company.‘”
After its initial sweep of 1/400th of the sky, NASA’s Kepler telescope finds over 1200 planets — 54 of them potentially inhabitable. (The picture above is a rendering of the six-planet Kepler-11 system, 2000 light-years away.)
Discover‘s Phil Plait puts today’s findings in proper perspective: “Mind you, Kepler is only looking at a sample of stars that is one one-millionth of all the stars in the Milky Way. So it’s not totally silly to take these numbers and multiply them by a million to estimate how many planets there may be in the galaxy…70 million Earth-size planets, and a million in the habitable zone of their stars. A frakking million. In our galaxy alone.”
“Our findings are a reminder that life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” Felisa Wolfe-Simon, an astrobiology researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said.“
Whoa. NASA announces it has discovered a strange new bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that use arsenic instead of phosphorus, previously considered indispensable to life. “It gets in there and sort of gums up the works of our biochemical machinery,’ ASU’s Ariel Anbar, a co-author of the Science paper, explained.
Big doings? Definitely — The existence of these viable microbes suggests new biochemical possibilities for life on distant (or even not-so-distant) planets. But Discover‘s Ed Yong advises caution: “The discovery is amazing, but it’s easy to go overboard with it…For a start, the bacteria – a strain known as GFAJ-1 – don’t depend on arsenic. They still contain detectable levels of phosphorus in their molecules and they actually grow better on phosphorus if given the chance. It’s just that they might be able to do without this typically essential element – an extreme and impressive ability in itself.“
Update: “As soon as Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. ‘I was outraged at how bad the science was,’ she told me.” Hold the champagne: Slate‘s Carl Zimmer surveys the scientific pushback, and it is considerable. “‘[N]one of the arguments are very convincing on their own.’ That was about as positive as the critics could get. ‘This paper should not have been published,’ said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.”
“We may have to abandon this notion of using the Milky Way as a template for the rest of the universe,” Dr. van Dokkum said. If the findings are correct, an undercount of dwarfs would mean astronomers have underestimated the masses of galaxies, and that would mean that galaxies developed earlier and faster than currently thought.“
Another big happening on the astrobiology front. As first seen at Dangerous Meta, a joint Harvard-Yale study published in Nature finds that our universe may have three times as many stars as we thought. “That suggests a universe of roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more.“
“[I]t probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that’s a minimum requirement for the presence of life.“
Some might remember that Gliese 581c was all the rage two years ago. Apparently, this one — in the same solar system but only just discovered — is even closer to the real deal. (Good thing the NASA authorization just passed…)
In potentially very big doings, two astrobiology papers suggest that some form of life is currently consuming gas and fuel on Saturn’s moon of Titan (The gas being hydrogen and fuel being acetylane, which would make sense for a methane-based life form.) “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth. If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.’” Yes, that would be exciting.
Update: NASA’s Chris McKay advises scientific caution. “This is a still a long way from ‘evidence of life’. However, it is extremely interesting.”