life on other planets

September 26, 2014

Some of Earth’s Water Is Older Than Our Solar System

Shawn Hopkins life on other planets, Solar System, The Sun, water 0

Scientists have determined a significant portion of the water in our solar system, including the water on Earth, predates our solar system and probably came from interstellar space. And that’s good news for the search for life on other planets. Our solar system formed from a proto-planetary disc of swirling gas and other matter that encircled our sun. This mass probably had interstellar ice in it from the start, a team including the Carnegie Institution’s Conel Alexander and L. Ilsedore Cleeves from the University of Michigan concluded. The question was whether this ice has survived until the present day to become the water you put in your Slip ‘N Slide or if it was destroyed and new water was formed along with our solar system. The key is the ratio of hydrogen and its heavier isotope deuterium in the water found on Earth, meteorite and comet samples. Interstellar ice is more likely to have more deuterium because it forms at super cold temperatures. If all the interstellar water was destroyed,

June 2, 2014

Newly Discovered ‘Mega-Earth’ is ‘The Godzilla of Earths’

Shawn Hopkins Astronomy, Kepler, life on other planets, mega-Earth, origin of life 0

Forget “super-Earths.” Those giant rocky planets are old and busted. Today astronomers announced they had discovered a much bigger “mega-Earth,” a rocky planet 17 times heavier than our earth. The mega-Earth Kepler-10c is so big that astronomers previously thought such a planet was impossible, because it was theorized something with that much mass would have drawn hydrogen gas to itself in its creation and became a gas giant. But there it is, 560 light-years away in the constellation Draco. “This is the Godzilla of Earths!” said Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) researcher Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. “But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.” The discovery of Kepler-10c will require scientist to recalculate the odds for finding life in the universe. Because only hydrogen and helium existed in the early universe, heavier elements needed to make rocky planets had to be formed within stars and scattered as those stars exploded, a lengthy process. But Kepler-10c is in a system that’s 11 billion