FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Warren Rochelle: How much of your own life—settings, events, people, pets—do you borrow and use? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf
Saturn’s most Earth-like moon looks a bit less likely to host life, thanks to quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic particles. Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede, is unique in two ways that have convinced some researchers that this moon might host extraterrestrial life: It’s the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it’s the only body in space, besides Earth, known to definitely have pools of liquid on its surface. In Titan’s case, those pools are frigid lakes of hydrocarbons, closer to the gasoline in a car … Read more
A pair of Harvard astrophysicists have proposed a wild theory of how life might have spread through the universe. Imagine this: Millions or billions of years ago, back when the solar system was more crowded, a giant comet grazed the outer reaches of our atmosphere. It was moving fast, several tens of miles above the Earth’s surface — too high to burn up as a fireball, but low enough that the atmosphere slowed it down a little bit. Extremely hardy microbes were floating up there in its path, and some of those bugs survived the collision with the ball of … Read more
FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Amy Leibowitz: How do you handle writing while dealing with big life stuff (like raising a family or a chronic illness)? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf
A new study suggests that when some ancient meteorites crash-land on Earth, they bring a dash of extraterrestrial sugar with them. To be clear, this is not table sugar (sadly, scientists still have no insight into whether aliens prefer their coffee black or sweetened). Rather, in the powdered samples of two ancient, carbon-filled meteorites, astronomers have found traces of several sugars that are key to life — including ribose, the sugary base of RNA (ribonucleic acid). According to lead study author Yoshihiro Furukawa, this is the first time that these bioessential sugars have been detected in meteorites. The find gives … Read more
Mars may seem barren and inhospitable today, but long ago the Red Planet once looked very different. Once upon a time, Mars was warmer than it is now, and covered in rivers, lakes and seas. There’s no way of saying for sure whether Martians ever existed, experts say. Still, there’s mounting evidence that Mars was not only habitable in theory, but actually home to some kind of extraterrestrial life. It’s even possible that remnants of that life still lurk undiscovered beneath Mars’ surface. Here are six reasons why astrobiologists believe in the possibility of life on Mars. River Valleys and … Read more
Black holes are engines of destruction on a cosmic scale, but they may also be the bringers of life. New research on supermassive black holes suggests that the radiation they emit during feeding frenzies can create biomolecular building blocks and even power photosynthesis. The upshot? Far more worlds roaming the Milky Way and beyond could be suitable to life, the researchers speculated. For their new study, published May 24 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists created computer models to look at the radiating disks of gas and dust called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, that swirl around supermassive black holes. Some … Read more
Life may have arisen in our solar system before Earth even finished forming. Planetesimals, the rocky building blocks of planets, likely had all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it way back at the dawn of the solar system, said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University (ASU). And clement conditions may have persisted inside some planetesimals for tens of millions of years — perhaps long enough for life to emerge, said Elkins-Tanton, the director of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of NASA’s upcoming mission to the odd metallic asteroid … Read more
Life may have traveled to Earth from afar, aboard an interstellar visitor like the weird, cigar-shaped object ‘Oumuamua, researchers say. ‘Oumuamua, which zoomed through the inner solar system last fall, is the first confirmed interstellar object ever observed in our neck of the woods. But that doesn’t mean it was the first ever to get here — far from it, in fact. “We think that something like an ‘Oumuamua … there’s always one within about 1 AU of the sun at any given time,” planetary scientist Bill Bottke said last month during a panel discussion at the Breakthrough Discuss conference … Read more
There’s a rocky planet out there that’s very big and cold. Its sun, a red dwarf named “Barnard’s star” looks much larger in its sky than Earth’s. It bathes the planet in X-rays and ultraviolet light, likely enough radiation to strip away any atmosphere. But Barnard’s star is also much dimmer than Earth’s host star, so the planet’s surface is probably a frozen wasteland — the sort of place that likely wouldn’t have any liquid water, and that most scientists wouldn’t expect to support life. But a new analysis suggests that the planet, named Barnard B, might give rise to … Read more