Reply With QuoteInteresting. Thanks for the heads up.
Press conference on Wednesday 22nd at 13:00 EST / 18:00 GMT about a discovery beyond our solar system.
From https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...r-solar-system :
I note that one of the press conference participants, Sara Seager, is working on finding chemical signatures that may indicate life (either similar or dissimilar to ours):Feb. 20, 2017
MEDIA ADVISORY M17-019
NASA to Host News Conference on Discovery Beyond Our Solar System
NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 22, to present new findings on planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets. The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.
Details of these findings are embargoed by the journal Nature until 1 p.m.
Limited seating is available in the NASA TV studio for media who would like to attend in person at the agency’s Headquarters at 300 E Street SW in Washington. Media unable to attend in person may ask questions by telephone. To attend in person or participate by phone, media must send an email with their name, affiliation and telephone number to Dwayne Brown at dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov by noon Feb. 22.
Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.
The briefing participants are:
· Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington
· Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium
· Sean Carey, manager of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California
· Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
· Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
A Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about exoplanets will be held following the briefing at 3 p.m. with scientists available to answer questions in English and Spanish.
For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and updated scheduling information, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv
For more information on exoplanets, visit:
http://exoplanets.nasa.gov
-end-
Felicia Chou / Sean Potter
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1536
felicia.chou@nasa.gov / sean.potter@nasa.gov
Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425
elizabeth.landau@jpl.nasa.gov
Last Updated: Feb. 20, 2017
Editor: Karen Northon
Sara Seager, has decided to tackle this problem by coming up with a roster of possible chemical combinations that could signal the presence of alien life. She and her biochemistry colleagues spent a couple of years churning out computer-generated mixtures of the six main elements associated with life on Earth: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulfur and hydrogen. But they were combinations unseen on our planet.
“The theory ended up being, we should maybe consider all potential molecules that could be in gas form,” Seager said recently. “Why not consider all of them? I just combine them in any way possible, like just taking letters in the alphabet and combining them in all ways.”
It’s still a problem to pin down which ones correspond to biologically useful recipes, and which do not.
Still, it might just be a start on the trail of truly alien beings, trafficking in exotic gases and chemicals.
“We’re going to have so few planets, we have to get lucky,” Seager said. “I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to miss it because we weren’t smart enough to think of some molecule.”
(From https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/the-sear...fe/life-signs/ )
Last edited by markrlondon; 21st February 2017 at 04:18.
Interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
So clever my foot fell off.
Hopefully they've found a "signature" of life. There's so many trillions of stars, there NOT being life out there would be unbelievable.
Finding evidence of multi-cellular life or intelligence; now that would be great.
Only if you consider that life similar to ours, similar to the mix of gases we breathe, gravity that is exerted on us etc. I liken it to the creatures that live in the very deepest sections of our oceans, completely alien in all sense, survive in pressures which would crush us in a millisecond yet they are made of jelly and swim around like they breathe our air at 1 bar.Originally Posted by PamFan
Fas est ab hoste doceri
I'm no mathematician but there's approximately 100 billion stars in each galaxy. There's about 200 billion galaxies. Surely some self replicating protein must be out there somewhere?
My youngest is very much in to astronomy and we attend lectures at a local observatorium every month or so. Last lecture was about the chance of finding 'aliens'. That's when I learned about Drake's equation. It looks like a difficult equation but it isn't. Mind you, he's referring to an intelligent, communicative form of life in the galaxy.
Google Drake's equation for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
They have to find "something" pretty often and now damned quick or their budgets will be trumped.
You looked in the Bear Pit?
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
That is what I felt, although I read a book that argued there were so many freak occurrences to create intelligent life that it was actually more likely not to have happened that have happened.
And yet there is another theory that says that given that the building blocks of life are common throughout the universe, that given the right circumstances (ie planets within the Goldilocks Zone - of which there will be literally billions), the emergence of life is very likely and may even be inevitable.
Intelligent life though and it's window of opportunity may be considerably rarer, but still mathematically highly probable and with potentially thousands or even millions of technological societies viable at any one time.
The issue, and this really is the difficult one to conceptualise, is just how big the the universe is.
I find this brilliant four minute video puts it all into perspective:
And then do yourself a favour - turn down the lights, turn up the sound and let Morgan Freeman take you on an IMAX HD trip to the edge of the universe and then to the quantum level.
So clever my foot fell off.
They will probably announce to the world, that................
They have found a secret stash of Rolex Daytonas................ Enough to feed the world
Al
Thank you for posting those videos, TheFlyingBanana. Superb, yet marginally terrifying!
Maybe they've found Planet 'X' and yes the Universe is pretty big :)
I thought that they have already found an Earth like planet in the habitable zone about twice the size of Earth?? - maybe they have found others.
In the near future they will be able to analyse the direct light from the exo-planet and perform spectral analysis on the light and look for life forming compounds etc.
Even if they found the signatures of life, there's no way to prove anything :( :(
Last edited by odyseus10; 21st February 2017 at 13:59.
Wow! that is utterly amazing... billions of light years away, not even comprehendable..does it go on & on infinitely? I wonder.
Hopefully they have worked out how to bend space.
Or that we are about to be enter a black hole in 3 years
Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
M
Meteorite coming?Hopefully they have worked out how to bend space.
Or that we are about to be enter a black hole in 3 years
Maybe North Koreans could help out?
Hope they have not found LV-426
From https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-space...w-sara-seager/
The news, which will also be published in the journal Nature, is officially embargoed until the start of the news conference. We've seen the research, and while we can't share details yet, let's just say it could very easily provide us with new settings for many future works of science fiction.
No, the universe has an edge. Beyond the edge there really is nothing, not even time.
Perhaps there are other universes, though.
Bookmarked so I can watch Morgan Freeman's video when I get home tonight.
I wonder if its "light".
exoplanet with unexplained light output from its dark side not obviously attributable to reflected system local light sources. Could possibly be caused by artifical lighting at night from cities.
Whether they can definitively say its not caused by other "natural" phenomena like surface vulcanism or lightning I wouldn't know.
I was under the impression they detect exoplanets by their occlusion and possibly gravitational distortion effect of light from the local system star. Maybe they can detect unusual light output as a consequence.
I don't think they can detect elemental content like atmospheric gases so I doubt they can detect complex trace compounds like chlorophyl. Could be wrong though.
probably more likely its a planet in the goldilocks zone of a sol like star thats close to earth's size and gravity.
Last edited by Mr.D; 21st February 2017 at 18:10.
Whatever it is, it'll seem really boring now after this thread!!
I was in a pop up planetarium this weekend with the kids, it was ace. There was a video clearly pitched at the nippers that was explaining how they detect exoplanets and I *thought* they said that analysis of the wavelengths of light suggested the gases in the exoplanets atmosphere.
I'm not certain on that as I was mostly stopping child one from bludgeoning child two with a home-made bottle rocket at the time.
Perhaps we should be keeping a low profile as suggested by Stephen Hawking?
They might pay is a visit
A genuine LOL moment!
R
Ignorance breeds Fear. Fear breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds Ignorance. Break the chain.
Thanks for posting this. Just watched both and really enjoyed them.
A small sidestep: a visit to an observatorium and to be able to observe the nightly sky with a telescope is really something you have to put on your bucket list! Lucky for me, there's an observatorium (with a small auditorium) only 7 mls from my house.
A few words to capture the experience: humbling, awesome and visual magic
Charming company?
I'll go along with that.
The problem is finding it when such vast distances are involved, not to mention time. The next nearest star to our own Sun would take at least 18,000 years to travel to. Any intelligent life would have to be capable of communication. And it would have to have evolved in a parallel time to our own. Intelligent life may have been trying to communicate with us in the Middle Ages, or in the last Ice Age, but we were not equipped to receive that communication. Any communication from Earth would take a long time to reach a receptive intelligent life form. I think it's about 75,000 light years from the Earth to the edge of the Milky Way. So that's a round trip of 150,000 years just to receive a reply from the outer edge of our own Galaxy, let alone the rest of the Universe. The Universe must be teeming with life, but the odds are stacked against discovering it, unless it's bacteria on Mars.
It does seem most likely that the announcement later today will be to announce new habitable zone, terrestrial-like planets, doesn't it.
However, according to NASA's Exoplanet Exploration home page, there are already 3449 confirmed exoplanets in 2557 solar systems, with an amazing 348 terrestrial-like planets amongst them (I'm not sure if all those are habitable zone though), so a major announcement might seem to be overkill just to announce a few new terrestrial-like planets. Maybe they will be really promising planets.
I was reading the Exoplanet Exploration website and it seems that the Hubble Space Telescope has already been used to do some spectrographic analysis of planetary atmospheres (i.e. detecting atmospheric elements) but there are new missions being designed now and launched soon that are specifically intended for this role (using shields to cut out the usually overwhelming light of the exoplanets' stars so as just to focus directly on the exoplanets).
It does therefore seem a bit too soon for NASA to be announcing that they have been able to detect possibly artificial light coming off the dark side of a planet or biologically (or industrially?) significant elements in an exoplanet's atmosphere, but who knows. Maybe they got lucky. Perhaps something new has been discovered at Proxima Centauri b.
Even if it's not today, I feel we are not now far from direct detection of biologically-significant gaseous elements on one of the rapidly increasing number of Earth-like exoplanets.
Detection of light or other radiation emanating directly from non-illuminated sides of an exoplanet or of industrially-significant atmospheric elements would be even more exciting. And frightening.
We'll see, I guess.
See the more we verify that there is a destination out there worth visiting the more likely it is that there will be a push towards getting there.
There are options other than slow big tin cans with smart meat passengers. In a thousand years we might well be able to store or copy conciousness and recreate functional bodies from base elements at the other end. Even if we can't get through the lightspeed barrier there are arguably solutions to interstellar travel within 100years if you take human mortality out of the picture. Sentient AI might be the first "people" who become interstellar travelers.
The wealth that a colony in another solar system would represent would be massive. Not to mention the evolutionary advantage of being able to not put all your eggs in one basket.
If we actually discovered sentient life I strongly suspect it would be a new renaissance . I doubt we would go to all that effort just to have a punchup with the first new face across the street we meet. When two interstellar civilisations meet up I predict that within a few generations the cultures become so rapidly mixed with the hunger for informational exchange you end up with a single hybrid culture.
The mutual value to both cultures would be irresistable , even large ideological and biological differences would be negotiated without much difficulty. War is about probably the only thing that wouldn't happen. It would be pointless from both a resource and cultural perspective.
^ Hippy.
:)
That DOES intrigue me!
More speculation here...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/articl...r-solar-system
Could be a discovery of water rather than light or gas
I really hope the find new life, might even keep Trump out of the news for at least a day and a half!
Sent from my iPhone using TZ-UK mobile app
My guess, and it really is only a guess, is that it is an Earth size planet, in the goldilocks zone, and that they have detected the spectroscopic signature of gasses produced by biological processes in its atmosphere*
If this is so, it is perhaps one of the most, if not the most significant scientific discovery in history.
*The caveat here though is that even if they have, they are unlikely to be able to state that this is unequivocal 100% proof of extra-planetary life, but that it gives a very high probability. There is usually the possibility that such gases could be produced by unusual or even unknown geological processes.
So clever my foot fell off.
It's life Jim, but not as we know it......
Wow super cool. Just spent sometime at the NASA website.....really impressive.
I'm hoping there'll be a similar website run from Proxima B called TZPB.
On their forum, the members will probably be moaning about second-hand plasma boots.
Made me chuckle
in that case try www.space.com
You'll love it.
So clever my foot fell off.
Oh for crying out loud, surely everyone knows that the attempted wearing of size small plasma boots will set off a chain reaction that will unravel the entire fabric of the universe and destroy all life forever?
That's why the sale of second hand (small) plasma boots was outlawed for all eternity following the thousand year intergalactic war caused by the founder Obiwanbourne banning a certain member for attempting to pass them off as "tactical" glow in the dark footwear.
That and the great Bollex Subatomicmariner purge of the Eighth Dimension directly caused the deaths of trillions.
So let's not kick it all off again, eh?
Note to Andyg - this isn't all necessarily true. Ok?
So clever my foot fell off.
Sorry, my Lord. I shall banish myself to the planet of the Foul Mammygons.
Think this is the live link to the press conference.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasa...ex.html#public
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