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Earth is “well-hidden” to extraterrestrial observers using photometric microlensing to hunt for habitable planets that might support life, an international team of researchers has concluded. The findings could also help to narrow down the best areas of the galaxy to target in our own searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When looking for potentially inhabited planets beyond the solar system, astronomers have a variety of tools at their disposal. As it stands, by far the most successful of these has been the transit technique, which has made about 75% of all the exoplanet discoveries so far. This approach involves watching for...

Sun-like star co-orbiting with black hole Gaia BH1 is a Sun-like star co-orbiting with a black hole estimated at 10 times the Sun's mass. (ESO/L. Calcada) In 1916, Karl Schwarzchild theorized the existence of black holes as a resolution to Einstein's field equations for his Theory of General Relativity. By the mid-20th century, astronomers began detecting black holes for the first time using indirect methods, which consisted of observing their effects on surrounding objects and space. Since the 1980s, scientists have studied supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which reside at the center of most massive galaxies in the Universe. And by...

ExploreIGO, a Twitter fan account devoted to icy worlds, asked its community yesterday what to call a spacecraft visiting the big blue world. Embedded with the tweet is a 2021 proposal by three scientists led by Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The group told the U.S. decadal survey of planetary science that a spacecraft to Uranus is a "journey whose time has come." Uranus was voted the top destination by the community in April after this proposal process, which was led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The decadal committee called...

According to scientists, images from the SPECULOOS (‘Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes, located in Chile and the island of Tenerife, have indicated that a distant planet may harbor the necessary conditions for life. The planet LP 890-9c orbits the star, LP 890-9, which rests 100 light-years from Earth. 40% larger than Earth, LP 890-9c orbits LP 890-9 roughly every 8.5 days, which was confirmed by the MuSCAT3 instrument in Hawaii. Scientists believe that fact permits the supposition that the planet exists in the “habitable zone” around the star. “The habitable zone is a concept under which a...

Editor’s Note: This post highlights images from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process. For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets....

An artist’s impression of the Saturn-size exoplanet WASP-39b, 700 light-years away - NASA; ESA; CSA; JOSEPH Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away—the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery, made by the James Webb Space Telescope, provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb may identify a spate of other gases, such as methane and ammonia, which could hint at a planet’s potential habitability for life. Webb is “ushering in this new era of the...

VIDEO at link............... Aug. 24 (UPI) -- A team of researchers have discovered an exoplanet about 100 light years away from Earth in the Draco constellation, and they say the world appears to be covered in a deep ocean. The exoplanet -- called TOI-1452b -- is slightly larger than the Earth and is located in a "Goldilocks zone," where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. Therefore, astronomers think TOI-1452b could be covered in an ocean. The exoplanet orbits "a nearby visual-binary M dwarf" star. University of Montreal researcher Dr. Charles Cadieux led the...

Explanation: Over 4000 planets are now known to exist outside our Solar System. Known as exoplanets, this milestone was passed last month, as recorded by NASA's Exoplanet Archive. The featured video highlights these exoplanets in sound and light, starting chronologically from the first confirmed detection in 1992 and continuing into 2019. The entire night sky is first shown compressed with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy making a giant U. Exoplanets detected by slight jiggles in their parents-star's colors (radial velocity) appear in pink, while those detected by slight dips in their parent star's brightness (transit) are shown...

Circumplanetary Disk Star AS 209 Scientists studying the young star AS 209 have detected gas in a circumplanetary disk for the first time, which suggests the star system may be harboring a very young Jupiter-mass planet. Science images from the research show (right) blob-like emissions of light coming from otherwise empty gaps in the highly-structured, seven-ring disk (left). Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bae (University of Florida) ALMA Makes First-Ever Detection of Gas in a Circumplanetary Disk Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study planet formation have made the first-ever detection of gas in a circumplanetary disk. What’s...

Humanity didn’t get any good views of the surface of Ceres until 2015, when NASA’s Dawn mission snapped the first (relatively) close-by images of the dwarf planet. With these, came the revelation that Ceres’ surface is surprisingly diverse in terms of structures and composition. In turn, this pointed to unexpected levels of geological activity brewing unseen below the crust. Ceres, as its classification of a dwarf planet suggests, is very small. So small... that researchers were absolutely convinced that it had cooled down completely all the way to its core and that it was, geologically speaking, a dead world. What...

Black Hole Police Spot Extragalactic Black Hole Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. A stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own, has been found by a team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says project leader Tomer Shenar. Furthermore, they discovered that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished with...

As NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope is sending back its first remarkable images of our universe, “queer agender” feminist physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wants you to know she remains miffed at the telescope’s moniker. Late last year, the University of New Hampshire professor and three other scientists demanded NASA ditch Webb’s name from the project due to his alleged homophobia. Prior to Webb’s appointment as head of NASA in 1961, he allegedly played a role in the so-called “Lavender Scare” as a State Department official. In response to a petition started by Prescod-Weinstein et. al., NASA investigated the issue last...

TRAPPIST-1e TRAPPIST-1e is a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star 39 light-years from Earth and may have water and clouds, as depicted in this artist’s impression. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1e ************************************************************************ To search for alien life, astronomers will search for clues in the atmospheres of distant planets – and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just proved it’s possible to do so. The ingredients necessary for life are spread throughout the universe. While Earth is the only known place with life in the universe, detecting life beyond our planet is a major goal of modern astronomy and planetary science....

Graphic on the different types of "exoplanets" which the new James Webb telescope will be investigating to determine the composition of their atmospheres and the presence of water. The first stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope were revealed this week, but its journey of cosmic discovery has only just begun. Here is a look at two early projects that will take advantage of the orbiting observatory's powerful instruments. The first stars and galaxiesOne of the great promises of the telescope is its ability to study the earliest phase of cosmic history, shortly after the Big Bang 13.8...

NASA has a provided a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of the highly-anticipated release next week of the first deep-space images from the James Webb Telescope – an instrument so powerful it can peer back into the origins of the Universe. An engineering test image. (NASA, CSA, and FGS team) The US$10 billion observatory – launched in December last year and now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth – can look where no telescope has looked before thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer through dust...

Industrial-scale agriculture has changed the make up of our atmosphere. So "exofarms" ought to be visible on Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. One of the key developments separating modern civilization from the hunter gatherer societies of the past is the invention of farming, which took place about 10,000 years ago. This began with the cultivation of wild plants and the domestication of various animals for dairy products and meat. The big advantage of farming is that it sustains a much larger population than hunting and gathering. This led to the emergence of cities, the sharing of natural resources and of...

Intelligent Life Really Can’t Exist Anywhere Else Hell, our own evolution on Earth was pure luck. In research published in 2020 from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, scientists study the likelihood of key times for evolution of life on Earth and conclude that it would be virtually impossible for that life to evolve the same way somewhere else. Life has come a very long way in a very short time on Earth, relatively speaking—and scientists say that represents even more improbable luck for intelligent life that is rare to begin with. For decades, scientists and even philosophers have chased...

Extraterrestrial space archaeology is engaged with the search for relics of other technological civilizations. It resembles a survey for plastic bottles in the ocean as they keep accumulating over time. The senders may not be alive when we find the relics. These circumstances are different from those encountered by the famous Drake equation, which quantifies the likelihood of detecting radio signals from extraterrestrials. That case resembles a phone conversation in which the counterpart must be active when we listen. Not so in extraterrestrial archaeology. What would be the substitute to Drake’s equation for space archeology? If our instruments survey a...

“If Planet Nine is real, it would be on such an odd orbit and so far out in the outer Solar System, that it would really challenge our ideas of planet formation and dynamics,” Ann-Marie Madigan, assistant professor of astrophysics... Madigan isn’t searching for just one planet — she’s looking for an entire belt of celestial objects. Like Planet Nine, this proposed Zderic-Madigan, or ZM, belt would be really out there, far beyond the Kuiper belt, with some of its closest bodies being more than twice as far from the Sun as Pluto at perihelion. Unlike the Kuiper belt, this...

Illustration of the two newly discovered exoplanets. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) Two new worlds of probable rocky mineral goodness have just been found orbiting a star close to our own cosmic neighborhood. The two newly discovered exoplanets are what are known as super-Earths – bigger than Earth, but smaller than an ice giant – orbiting a cool red dwarf star called HD 260655, which is just 33 light-years away. While the worlds are unlikely to be habitable, given our current understanding of life, the star and its exoplanets are among the closest multi-world systems to Earth. This makes it an excellent target for...