Category Astronomy/Space

Rendering of a possible alien Exo-planet. Elements of this image furnished by NASA. (Stock image) Credit: © mode_list / Fotolia

New research has revealed fewer than predicted planets may be capable of harboring life because their atmospheres keep them too hot. When looking for planets that could harbor life, scientists look for planets in the ‘habitable zones’ around their stars – at the right distance from the stars to allow water to exist in liquid form. Traditionally, this search has focused on looking for planets orbiting stars like our Sun, in a similar way to Earth.

However, recent research has turned to small planets orbiting very close to stars called M dwarfs, or red dwarfs, which are much smaller and dimmer than the Sun...

Rosetta’s comet in August 2015, when it was closest to the sun and when most of the glycine was detected. Credit: ESA

Ingredients crucial for the origin of life on Earth, including the simple amino acid glycine and phosphorus, key components of DNA and cell membranes, have been discovered at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The possibility that water and organic molecules were brought to the early Earth through impacts of objects like asteroids and comets have long been the subject of important debate...

An artist’s conception of Kepler-62f, a planet in the ‘habitable zone’ of a star located about 1,200 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Combined climate, orbit models show Kepler-62f might be able to sustain life. The planet, in the direction of constellation Lyra, is ~40% larger than Earth. At that size, Kepler-62f is within the range of planets that are likely to be rocky and possibly could have oceans. NASA’s Kepler mission discovered the planetary system that includes Kepler-62f in 2013, and it identified Kepler-62f, the outermost of 5 planets orbiting a star that is smaller and cooler than the sun. but there was no composition, atmosphere or orbit data.

To determine whether the planet could sustain life, the team came up with possible scenarios about what it...

In principle, nothing that enters a black hole can leave the black hole. This has considerably complicated the study of these mysterious bodies on which generations of physicists have debated ever since 1916, the year their existence was hypothesized as a direct consequence of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. There is, however, some consensus in the scientific community on the fact that black holes possess an entropy, because their existence would otherwise violate the second law of thermodynamics. In particular, Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking have suggested that the entropy – a measure of the inner disorder of a physical system – of a black hole is proportional to its area and not to its volume, as would be more intuitive...