Campaign to search for extraterrestrial life (Part 1)

Things have changed since Secretary Kirk and Spock conducted a search for life and new civilizations. Back in the 1960s, while the Enterprise crew was exploring a galaxy filled with strange life forms, real astronomers were stuck in a solar system with eight devastated neighbors. There is no signal of any planet.

Now astronomers are finally starting to target the worlds like the earth orbiting stars. Some of the recent findings are even possible to survive.

While technology has yet to provide support to bring us to the stars, it also provides people with the tools that the residents of the 1960s could not have imagined. Those are the techniques for discovering objects thousands of miles away from us.

In the past 13 years, astronomers have used remote tools to classify over 300 planets outside the solar system.

Such first planets were many times larger than our planet, but recently there were smaller planets. In March, NASA launched a satellite named Kepler to search for hard-to-detect changes in starlight in the hope of discovering objects the size of Earth.

In the future, astronomers are expected to observe many smaller changes in starlight to analyze the atmosphere of such planets.

Ambitious projects that continue to explode have heated discussions among scientists when they met this month at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute to attend the symposium. search for life in the universe '.

Not only did NASA spend hundreds of millions of dollars scouring the galaxy in search of other worlds and analyzing them, which astronomers, biologists, and geologists deserve glasses are also discussing very seriously about alien life.

SETI campaign seeks life in the universe.(Photo: sabiduria)

The idea of ​​life search, though not easy to implement, is at least feasible.

Biologist Chris McKay of NASA-Ames Research Center in California asks: 'Why is this area so attractive? There may be a creator of the second world. We can have relative biochemistry, " which means that nature can also use alternative methods to create living organisms.

Even the floating layer on the lake can change our understanding of life and its place in the universe. We separate them to study how they double, what they eat, and how they grow.

Scientists are now struggling with the definition of life because every living thing on earth uses the same building block. Does life exist without carbon? What if life does not have DNA similar to ours?

There are too many stars in the universe. In 1966, the year the Star Trek television series was released, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that there are at least 100,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe - some stars will certainly be There is a solar system like us. But it is not easy to find living planets.

Astronomers call planets orbiting other stars, exoplanets, or planetary planets . Only two of these planets have been photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The remaining planets appear only indirectly or through swaying or small changes detected in their stars.

Perspectives on swaying are based on the principle that planets do not actually rotate around their sun, just like children go to school. Instead, a planet and its star revolve around the center of gravity. Although the center of gravity is closer to the star, the interaction forces the star to orbit a small orbit that, if viewed from the earth, we will see it seem to be shaking.

But the impact was not easily observed, some astronomers were wrongly warned. Finally, in 1995, the first foreign planet was confirmed. From the swaying of stars, astronomers can claim that the planet is about the size of Jupiter and orbits a star closer to it than the distance between Mercury and the sun. Every year on this planet only lasts for 4 days. (continue)

Campaign to search for extraterrestrial life (Part 2)