Physics Buzz

In the search for extraterrestrial life, one of the most promising candidates so far is the tiny moon Enceladus. Research appearing today in the AAAS journal Science includes exciting new evidence of this promise—the detection of molecular hydrogen.

In an eagerly anticipated announcement, NASA just revealed new evidence that plumes of water are intermittently expelled from the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Last night, I sat down to dinner and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (I prefer the original series, but there’s only so many times you can watch Kirk & Co. fight the space-nazis before it starts to get old.) I picked one in the first season, called “Home Soil”, where Picard and his crew beam down to a desert world that’s being adapted to support life, only to discover that there’s already a strange form of intelligent life living in the subsurface water table. Terraforming an already-inhabited planet violates the Federation’s “prime directive”, creating all sorts of drama for the episode, but we’re not here today to focus on the moral quandaries of xenobiology. Rather, the episode contains some tidbits that sound at first like technobabble plot-spackle, but upon closer examination make you start to wonder if someone in the writers’ room had access to a time machine.

Exoplanets that are most likely to host life have eluded detection, until now. As far as we understand, the most likely place to find extraterrestrial life outside of our solar system is on a planet that is similar in size to Earth and located within the habitable zone of its host star where temperatures are just right for the abundance of liquid water. Comparison of Earth and Kepler 186f. To the right you can see the orbit of Kepler 186f compared to the other four exoplanets in the system that orbit closer to the star. Credit:  NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech Today, a group of scientists announced that with Kepler they have discovered the very first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone. Before now, scientists have observed Earth-sized exoplanets that were too close to their host star and therefore too hot for liquid water. Scientists have also observed a healthy amount of planets within their habitable zone, but the planets are too large to likely contain a rocky surface

This week on the physics central podcast I talk with David Waltham, a geologist at the University of London and the author of Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional—and What That Means for Life in the Universe.  In the book, Waltham presents the evidence supporting the idea that Earth is a very rare, very lucky planet, and that there may not be another life-supporting planet in our galaxy or even in the visible universe. Waltham doesn't think we're totally alone in the universe—but he does think we are effectively alone. This debate includes information from biology, geology, astronomy, cosmology and even history. Listen to the podcast to hear some of the evidence that supports this side of the argument—and a few of the things that could prove it wrong. Also, there are rumors flying that scientists have detected an Earth-like planet and will announce it soon.

Exoplanet eclipse. Credit: Bill Lile . Two hefeweizen-fueled scientists have completed what might be the most important scientific effort since the discovery of the Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect . Yesterday, Stephen R. Kane at the Center for Global Extinction Pandemic Control in San Francisco and his colleague Franck Zelziz in the Zombie Division for the Planetary Defense Institute in Bordeaux, France reported that not only might we, in our search for extraterrestrial life, uncover an alien race overrun with the fatal disease Spontaneous Necro-Animation Psychosis (SNAP), or Zombie-ism, but that the numbers are unnervingly high. “We have shown that there is a significantly non-zero probability that in the search for life in the universe we will also encounter large amounts of undeath [sic],” the authors report in their paper, which they have submitted for publication in the prestigious journal Necronomicon . What you are about to read may disturb you.

In a preprint article posted late last week, a team of astrobiologists claimed to have found fossilized algae embedded in meteorites that crash landed in Sri Lanka late last year. They're making a huge claim: purportedly, remnants of life from space have rained down on our tiny blue planet. The research may seem unbelievable, but it was even published in a "peer-reviewed" journal. These claims, however, are highly dubious. A closer look at this research — and where it was published — reveals how biased, suspicious research can make its way into the headlines. A paralia sulcata diatom found on Earth. Image Credit:  University of Tasmania