Thursday, February 2, 2023

3857 - LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS?

 

     -  3857  -   LIFE  ON  OTHER  PLANETS?    From black holes to the search                  for life and beyond, all of astronomy's greatest mysteries are on the table and astronomers are already planning how to solve them, using tools that range from the biggest space telescopes to arrays of tiny radio telescopes scattered across a desert on Earth.


            -------------------------  3857  -   LIFE  ON  OTHER  PLANETS?

            -    The James Webb Space Telescope might get all the credit, but a whole new era of telescopes, in space and on the ground,  is set to revolutionize astronomy.

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            -    Exoplanet astronomers are searching for planets around other stars that host conditions in which life can likely thrive, and simultaneously figuring out how to recognize whether an extrasolar planet can or does support life.

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            -    Recognizing life and understanding a planet's conditions are really complicated tasks. Not only do we need to look for the actual signs of life, known as biosignatures, but we also need to understand the context in which we spot those signs, the planet's environment, even including the behavior of the star it orbits.

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            -     Whereas JWST mainly uses transits, a planet crossing in front of its star, to observe Earth-size exoplanets, the “Habitable Worlds Observatory” will take a more direct approach, imaging the planets themselves, even down to Earth-like sizes.

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            -    "Extremely Large Telescopes" or ELTs are under construction in Hawaii and Chile that will have mirrors around 98 feet in diameter three times larger than any other optical telescope in existence.

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            -    The coming decades also promise new ways of seeing and hearing the universe, including the ability to detect more types of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time.

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            -    "LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory] is currently the only gravitational wave detector to have made a direct observation of gravitational waves.   However, LIGO is only looking at a small fraction of the whole spectrum of gravitational waves.  There are plenty of other signals it's not able to observe.

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            -    For these other gravitational waves, distinguished by their lower frequencies and longer-lasting signals, astronomers will need to wait for this space-based detector.   Like a massive LIGO detector, LISA will keep three satellites in a huge and perfect triangle as they all orbit the Earth together.

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            -     “Pulsars” are spinning dead cores of large stars that each shoot two beams of light into space like a cosmic lighthouse. Pulsars are often used to time events in the cosmos because they're so predictable that their time-keeping would only be off by 100 nanoseconds over an entire decade.

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            -    As gravitational waves pass through pulsars, astronomers can spot the tiny changes in the pulsar's regular rhythm. This method promises to reveal colliding pairs of black holes in which each partner is around a billion times the mass of our sun; the technique can also begin watching a black hole tango up to 25 million years before the objects merge.

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            -    Tens of radio telescopes across the globe, from the “Deep Synoptic Array” in California to the “MeerKAT telescope” in South Africa are undergoing upgrades and working together to gather the data needed for pulsar timing to reveal the impact of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes.

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            -    From ELTs to mega-sized space telescopes and beyond, scientists hope they will help answer our most fundamental questions: where did we come from, and are we alone? It's a historic time for astronomy, and for humankind as a whole.

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            February 1, 2023        LIFE  ON  OTHER  PLANETS?             3857                                                                                                                            

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            --------------------- ---  Thursday, February 2, 2023  ---------------------------

             

             

             

             

                     

             

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