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.

Stand by for an animated exploration of the famous Fermi Paradox. Given the vast number of planets in the universe, many much older than Earth, why haven't we yet seen obvious signs of alien life? The potential answers to this question are numerous and intriguing, alarming and hopeful.

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.

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 path of a Jupiter-size planet distorted the debris disk around the star Beta Pictoris. Due to the planet's flat orbit, astronomers once thought a second planet could have caused the distortion.

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

"Our solar system is different than the space right outside it, suggesting two possibilities," says David McComas, IBEX principal investigator in a statement. "Either the solar system evolved in a separate, more oxygen-rich part of the galaxy than where we currently reside, or a great deal of critical, life-giving oxygen lies trapped in interstellar dust grains or ices, unable to move freely throughout space."

A distant super-Earth named "55 Cancri e" is wetter and weirder than astronomers thought possible. The discovery has researchers re-thinking the nature of alien worlds.

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”.