Four new short-period giant planets discovered

(Phys.org)—Astronomers have detected four new giant exoplanets as part of the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) exoplanet survey. The newly found alien worlds are about the size of Jupiter, but ...

A serious search for extraterrestrial life

Things have changed since the original Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock set off to seek out new life and new civilizations. Back in the 1960s, while the Enterprise crew was exploring a galaxy full of exotic life-forms, real astronomers ...

Even if there's life on TRAPPIST-1, we probably can't detect it

If we ever find life on other worlds, it is unlikely to be a powerful message from space. It's certainly possible that an alien civilization specifically sends us a radio message like a scene out of Contact, but the more ...

How to learn a star's true age

(PhysOrg.com) -- For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. In space, the same is true of the actual stars. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we tell if a star is ...

Try failed stars for alien life

The search for alien life usually focuses on planets around other stars. But a lesser-known possibility is that life has sprung up on planets that somehow were ejected from their original solar systems and became free-floating ...

Volunteers to hunt for 'lost planets'

(PhysOrg.com) -- The public are being asked to help Oxford University astronomers find planets orbiting other stars which may have been 'lost' in the data from over 100,000 stars. Volunteers could even find 'Earth-like' alien ...

Probing Question: What is a Near Earth?

In the 1997 movie "Contact" (based on the novel by Carl Sagan), actress Jodie Foster plays an astrophysicist devoted to SETI -- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Despite doubting colleagues, she vigilantly monitors ...

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