Science News

The discovery of life beyond Earth would shake up our view of humanity's place in the universe, but it probably wouldn't seriously threaten organized religion, experts say.

Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku talks about life across the universe and the existence of other dimensions.

Articles about ASTRONOMY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=astronomy

Carl Sagan said that "extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence." In a stunning display of mathematical logic vs common sense, David Spiegel of Princeton University and Edwin Turner from the University of Tokyo published a paper last summer that turns the Drake equation upside down using Bayesian reasoning to show that just because we evolved on Earth, doesn’t mean that the same occurrence would necessarily happen elsewhere; "using evidence of our own existence doesn’t show anything" they argue, "other than that we are here."

The simulations were a big undertaking, but the results are in: Without our moon, we would, indeed, suffer larger swings in Earth’s tilt. But here’s the good news: Even over the course of hundreds of millions of years, these swings are not fast and traumatic. Lissauer’s team reckons that the tilt of a moonless Earth would be stable enough, for long enough, to allow complex life to gain a claw-hold, or at least to adapt to new environmental circumstances when the poles moved.

The search for extraterrestrial life outside our Solar System is currently focused on extrasolar planets within the ‘habitable zones’ of exoplanetary systems around stars similar to the Sun.

What conditions are scientists looking for in their search for life on another planet? The presence of water is key, explains Bill Nye, aka The Science Guy.

Autonomous, self-replicating robots -- exobots -- are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, who notes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence -- SETI -- is in its 50th year.

Extraterrestrial beings monitoring Earth might view changes in our atmosphere as symptomatic of a a self-destructing civilization and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, according to a highly speculative scenario developed last year by scientists at NASA and Penn State University.

Have you ever given any thought to intergalactic SETI? On the face of it, the idea seems absurd — we have been doing SETI in one form or another since the days of Project Ozma and without result.

A rare and exotic mineral, so unusual that it was thought impossible to exist, came to Earth on a meteorite, according to an international team of researchers led by Princeton University scientists.