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Apr 27, 2016 · So without further ado, here are ten of the National Geographic images that are, at this very moment, hurtling through space. Each photo is followed by the rationale for its inclusion on the ...
- Is E.T. phoning us from Proxima Centauri? The answer to weird signals happening in the universe is never aliens, until maybe it is. Earlier this month, researchers announced that they had captured a very mysterious beam of energy in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum at 980 megahertz, coming from the closest star to our own.
- Alien bacteria might live in the clouds of Venus. Astrobiologists were a-twitter with anticipation and skepticism in September when news broke of potential evidence of life in the upper clouds of Venus.
- 'Oumuamua could still be an alien artifact. Two years ago, scientists spotted a cigar-shaped object hurtling through the solar system. Dubbed 'Oumuamua, the entity is considered by most to be an interstellar comet flung out from around another star.
- Navy declassifies UFO videos but don't believe the hype. A fair number of Earthlings don't care what ambiguous evidence scientists come up with to show that aliens are out there.
- New Eyes on Alien Worlds
- Who Are You Looking at?
- The Moon to The Rescue
- Polarization: A New Angle on Exoplanets
- A Mind-Bending Plan
Two techniques will be particularly fruitful in that quest. One is transmission spectroscopy, which looks at the spectrum of starlight that has passed through an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Specific wavelengths will have been absorbed by atmospheric gases, leaving characteristic absorption lines in the spectrum. The lines form a chemical fingerprint th...
Despite these challenges, both Jiang and Mayorga believe that evidence of a potentially habitable world – or even signs of one that already harbours life – can be found among these reflected rays and filtered photons. But to ensure their exoplanetary biosignature techniques work, they first want to test them out on the Earth, which is the only worl...
Jiang’s work suggests a way to search for biology among the stars without having to guess its chemistry or assume that aliens must be similar to us. The only trouble is that the technique is based on data from DSCOVR, whose orbit lies between the Earth and the Sun. The craft therefore never sees our planet pass in front of the Sun, which means it c...
Beyond direct imaging and spectroscopy, there is a third way of analysing exoplanet light. That involves studying its polarization, which changes when light reflects off a surface. Smoother surfaces (such as calm water) generally reflect light waves over a narrow range of polarizations, whilst light bouncing off rougher surfaces (such as rocks or v...
One even crazier idea in the hunt for alien life involves sending craft out into the distant reaches of the solar system, 10 times further from the Sun than Pluto. As first calculated by Albert Einstein in 1936, distant light that skirts the edge of the Sun would be bent by its gravitational field, eventually converging to a focal point about 800 m...
Jan 18, 2021 · January 18, 2021. Encountering aliens would be surprising; the fact that we haven’t yet heard from any is perhaps even more so. Illustration by Paul Sahre. On October 19, 2017, a Canadian...
Sep 14, 2023 · 14 September 2023. By Brandon Livesay, BBC News. UFO on camera. A Nasa probe into hundreds of UFO sightings found there was no evidence aliens were behind the unexplained phenomena, but the space...
Oct 24, 2023 · The furthest of these, Nasa's Voyager 1 spacecraft, is 24 billion kilometres (15 billion miles) from Earth, requiring a powerful network of dishes on Earth known as the Deep Space Network to be ...
Jun 4, 2021 · A 2019 Gallup Poll found that a third of U.S. adults agreed with the idea that "some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies." Why the government report is ...
