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.

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.

NASA announced that Kepler has uncovered 1,094 more potential planets, twice the number it previously had been tracking, including more than 500 planets found to orbit stars beyond our solar system. IThe newly discovered Kepler 22-B is the smallest and the best positioned to have liquid water on its surface – among the ingredients necessary for life on Earth. It is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in a class known as “super-Earths”.

Nearly all of the alien planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope may end up being real exoplanets, according to a new study.

International boffins, poring over the results from mighty telescopes both spacegoing and ground-bound, say they have identified at least 16 potentially habitable Earth-like planets orbiting other stars: and at least 30 potentially habitable moons along the lines of the scientifictional Endor and Pandora, orbiting planets in other solar systems.

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Nov 22, 2011 - Most scientists think that we are not alone in the universe. Somewhere out there, there must be other intelligent forms of life.

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Nov 22, 2011 -
Most scientists think that we are not alone in the universe. Somewhere out there, there must be other intelligent forms of life.

A mummified elongated skull found in Peru could finally prove the existence of aliens, the Daily Mail newspaper reported Saturday.

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

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.

Will the future of space exploration evolve into a hybrid of human and robotic expeditions, one which may change the face of humanity in space? The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to...

Scientists searching for extraterrestrial life should look beyond Earth-like alien planets to planets that have more extreme, but still habitable, conditions, say researching proposing new planet habitability ratings.

Within the next few years, the number of planets discovered in orbits around distant stars will likely reach several thousand or more. But even as our list of these newly discovered "exoplanets" grows ever-longer, the search for life beyond our solar system will likely focus much more narrowly on the relatively few of these new worlds which exhibit the most Earth-like of conditions.