Life | The discovery of extraterrestrial life is closer because an astronomer suggests that it might even be in our solar system. Extraterrestrial life could be discovered over the next 20 years, but it will not look the way people expect, experts sustain. According to astronomer Chris Impey, scientists are on the verge of discovering microbes on other planets, such as the moon of Jupiter, Europe, because they contain conditions favourable to the development of life, according to Mail Online.
Although experts have been researching the sky for decades, the expert says we can detect microbial life for the next 10 or 15 years using the instruments on the James Webb telescope.
“I bet everything on the discovery of microbial life in the next 10-15 years, but I can not guarantee that we will detect intelligent life forms,” Professor Impey of the University of Arizona said.
The researcher claims that the greatest possibilities for detecting alien life forms are in our solar system.
A propitious satellite for such a discovery in Europe, the sixth-largest moon of Jupiter, which researchers have recently started studying. The moon has Earth-like features, but it is covered by oceans with frozen saltwater because of the distance between the heavenly body and the sun. NASA and ESA recently announced the launch of a future mission to better understand the celestial bodies covered by water. According to the teacher, studying the atmosphere on these celestial bodies is extremely important for establishing the possibility of alien life.
About half of the population on Earth believes in the existence of aliens
Almost half of the world’s population believes in the existence of alien life forms and wants to get in touch with them, according to a poll conducted in 24 countries, which, according to the researchers, explains the huge popularity of the Star Wars franchise. The results of the survey were published near the release date of a new Star Wars movie series, “The Last Jedi,” Reuters reported. Research results show that 47% of over 26,000 survey participants believe “in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe.”
Also, 61% of respondents answered affirmatively when asked whether they believe in life forms on other planets.
nearly 25% responded that I do not think there are intelligent alien life forms, according to the Glocalities specialists who conducted the survey. Of those who believe that people are not alone in the Universe, 60% said they should try to contact aliens. This is not the first survey on this issue, but it is the largest in the world, according to the authors.
“People who believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations are not a marginal minority,” the survey authors said.
Most of those who believe in aliens are from Russia, 68%, followed closely by Mexico and China, while the last place was the Netherlands, with 28%. The survey was conducted in 15 languages between December 2015 and February 2016, in countries accounting for 62% of the world’s population, or 80% of the global economy.
Winston Churchill believed that the existence of aliens as possible. 77 years ago, Winston Churchill believed that the existence of aliens as possible. The document he wrote that was hidden for nearly 80 years.
In 1939, Winston Churchill wrote an 11-page article on alien life, which was eventually not published. The document was rediscovered in 2016 and analyzed by Nature. The astrophysicist Dr Mario Livio, the first researcher to examine the paper, states: “At a time when world politicians are trying to avoid science, it seems amazing how deeply a political leader has been involved in the field.”
Nowadays, due to the discovery of new planets, discussions about the existence of aliens are frequently present in the social and academic environment. But Churchill wrote his work a long time before the exoplanets were discovered, notes IFL Science. The dominant theory of planet formation in the 1930s claimed that a star pulls the material from the Sun when it passes by. Churchill claimed he knew about this theory, but he was sceptical. Conscious of modern thinking, Churchill expressed his beliefs about the existence of liquid as the first necessity for life on other planets. From this idea came the “Goldilocks Zone” principle, which states that life can not exist at a distance of one star.
Churchill was aware of the challenges that interstellar journeys involved, expressing his hope of travelling on Mars and Venus, but concluded that humans would never know if the planets around Earth were living. Churchill wrote about a scientific subject that was considered obscure in those times, which surprised those who knew him only from his position as a leader in the Second World War. But Churchill was interested in life-long science, making popular scientific articles explaining the evolution, microbiology, and the possibility of emerging new technologies between the 1920s and 1930s.
Churchill’s interest in science played a decisive role in winning the war. He held the post of Prime Minister of Great Britain when he hired Alan Turing to break the Nazi code. Being familiar with the field of science, Churchill understood the potential of Turing’s work and ordered him to give the scientist everything he needed to break the German code, which was one of the most important decisions during the war. Researchers calculated how many living planets would contain the Milky Way Extraterrestrial life: for the first time, researchers have calculated how many living planets would contain the Milky Way – and the figure is daunting!
Studying the data gathered by the Kepler telescope, and extrapolating the results, astronomers have concluded that the Milky Way Galaxy, containing about 200 billion stars, could contain at least 8.8 billion Earth-like planets and could prove hospitable for life. A billion planets in our galaxy are about the same size as Terra, orbiting around stars similar to our Sun and found in the so-called Goldilocks area – where temperatures are neither too high nor too low, but just suitable for allows water to be in a liquid state, a condition that scientists think indispensable for the appearance and maintenance of life.
Using data from NASA’s Kepler telescope, scientists have calculated for the first time that there are 8.8 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
It means that “only in our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 8.8 billion throws of biological dice,” says Geoffrey Marcy, a researcher at the University of California – Berkeley and one of the authors of the study. The next step is to examine the atmosphere of these planets with the stronger telescopes that will be built in the future, looking for clearer clues about their potential to host life. The Kepler telescope examined 42,000 stars – a fraction of the total stars in the galaxy – and the scientists extrapolated the results to the hundreds of billions of stars contained in the Milky Way.
For the first time, they calculated – not estimated – how many of the Sun-like stars have Earth-like planets: 22%, with an error rate of 8 per cent. And these results are preliminary because there is still a great deal of data to analyze. In the Milky Way Galaxy there are about 200 billion stars, of which about 40 billion are similar to our Sun, Marcy says. These stars could have, in total, about. 8.8 billion planets similar to Terra and in the habitable area – in other words, potentially hospitable planets for life.
And this figure of 8.8 billion is just the beginning because scientists have considered in this study only Sun-like stars, which are not the type of stars that predominate in the galaxy. Much more widespread are the dwarf red stars, and a previous study showed that about 15% of them would have Earth-sized planets located in the Goldilocks area.
Putting all these data together, it appears that there would be about. 40 billion planets of the right size and located in the right areas, says Marcy.
But these findings, says the specialist, raise a tough question: “If we are not alone, then why is there” deafening silence “on the part of advanced civilizations in our galaxy?”
