On the golden record that accompanies the Voyager spacecraft, there is a map showing the location of Earth. It’s not a road map that you might pull out when navigating a city, but a 3D map showing the location of a star, the Sun, in a populous galaxy. But just how would this map work? And more importantly, what are the map markers? If you notice the lines at the bottom left of the golden record image, they all intersect at a common center point. This is the Sun, and the lines extend out showing relative distances to the nearest...
I recently had the opportunity to watch a brand new IMAX feature, called A Beautiful Planet. It features incredible views of the Earth from space, captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Most of the footage was taken during Expedition 42 on the ISS, starting with the arrival of Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Virts, and Anton Shkaplerov aboard the Soyuz TMA-15M, and ending with their departure. Much of the film was focused on the views of Earth, the scenic diversity of life and land that can only be seen from space. It was difficult to see the effects of humans during the day time,...
Life in the universe is a fascinating topic. The simplest question: Are we alone? It breeds so many deeper and more profound scientific questions, like “How many habitable planets are there?” “How likely is life to develop on any given planet?” and “How long can a civilization survive?” We can’t answer them definitively, but we can narrow it down. The Drake equation, shown above, was first developed by Frank Drake, the head of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), in 1961. He took the question of are we alone and made it quantifiable, in a probabilistic way. It lets us...
This story popped up yesterday, and I can imagine it will go far, since it talks about life in the universe. I get it, it’s what people are interested in, and at least this story is focused on the science of why this is the best place to look for intelligent civilizations, instead of “Oh hey there’s a strange ring of material around a star, must be an alien superstructure.” But I digress. So where is the best place to look for life in the universe? The answer is in a Globular Cluster. A globular cluster is one of the...
What do other planetary systems look like? We have seen some where massive Jupiter-sized worlds orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to the Sun, baking them with radiation. Others have had multiple rocky planets within the Earth’s orbit distance. Some have planets similar to Earth in a variety of locations. But what about far away from the star? We never expected to find gas giants like Uranus and Neptune in the far reaches of our solar system. Are there planetary systems where planets live even farther away? Maybe there are planets that live in the empty darkness between stars,...
Sometimes I love to say ‘I told you so,’ though in the world of science it’s more like ‘I gave you a high probability of this plausible scenario.’ A little while back a story broke about a star called KIC 8462852, with a strange ring of material surrounding it. One potential explanation was that an extraterrestrial civilization has constructed a giant ring to harvest it’s home star’s energy. Though this was one of a dozen possible explanations, it of course gathered the most steam among the general populace. In a statement today, officials from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) confirmed that...
100,000 Galaxies. Each one contains Billions upon Billions of stars. Each star could have planets, leading to countless possibilities of variation and the potential for life. But would we see the signs of civilization from Earth? Could a highly advanced civilization control the entire population of stars in their galaxy and harness that energy for their industry? Would they alter their stellar environment enough that we could see them? This is exactly the line of questioning that led astronomers to look at over 100,000 different nearby galaxies in mid-infrared emission to see some potential signs of Alien life. In these...
