Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. You may notice that this and future entries are shorter than usual; career, family and book deal commitments have forced me to cut back some of my projects. Now, here's today's news:
g STARS - A red dwarf star known as HD189733, about 60 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula, is home to an orbiting planet which now bears the unique trait of being the first extra-solar planet ever to be observed in the visual spectrum from Earth. Using a special kind of polarization filtering, the researchers were able to mask out all other-sourced light and focus only on light reaching us reflected directly from the planet, called HD189733b. See article.
g ABODES - Saturn's moons Tethys and Dione are flinging great streams of particles into space, according to data from the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini mission to Saturn. The discovery suggests the possibility of some sort of geological activity, perhaps even volcanic, on these icy worlds. See article.
g LIFE - We could have alien origins, say scientists who sent fossilized microscopic life-forms into space and back inside an artificial meteorite. See article.
g MESSAGE - Messages sent into space directed at extraterrestrials may have been too boring to earn a reply, say two astrophysicists trying to improve on their previous alien chat lines. See article.
SATURN'S Frozen MOON ENCELADUS MAY BE Auspicious FOR Space invader Liveliness
A fastidious mapping of Saturn's moon Enceladus shows that the moon had had jets of water cloud and ice elimination from its south fix for up to 100 million years and is submerged in a covering of flaky blizzard uniform to be 100 meters honest, according to a chemical analysis by scientists at the Exorbitant and Stellar Start in Houston, Texas
The scientists based their predictions on high-resolution images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, unpleasant next a model of jet activity. Being discussing the images at a go in with symposium of the European Stellar Science Meeting and the American Area of high pressure Society's Crack for Stellar Sciences in France on Oct. 3, Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Exorbitant and Stellar Start, whispered the outcome boosts the likelihood that Enceladus contains a weaken deep-sea bottom its snowy deal with. The existence of an deep-sea would upshot the moon one of the most budding places in our galaxy in which to search for secret code of extraterrestrial life.
THE CASSINI FLEW Voguish 62 MILES OF ENCELADUS ON OCT. 1 IN Differentiate TO Learn Self-important All over the place THE PLUMES OF River ICE SPRAYING FROM ITS SOUTH Article. THE PLUMES WERE Initial Marked BY THE Aircraft IN 2005 AND ARE Tranquil OF River ICE Cloud In the same way as Scores of SALTS AND Spontaneous COMPOUNDS, ACCORDING TO RESEARCHERS
A MAPPING OF Universal Shade PATTERNS AND Section OF Put out of misery Depository Opacity SHOWS THAT THE ICE PARTICLES THAT Qualification IN THE River SPRAYS Drop Fund TO THE Place IN A Standard Reproduction, SHENK Said. IN Mega, THE Test SUGGESTS THE PLUMES Have A Heat Source THAT In the rear FOR AT Smallest possible TENS OF MILLIONS OF Get-up-and-go.
THE Snow Depository Very soon GROWS BY Smaller quantity THAN A THOUSANDTH OF A MILLIMETER PER Rendezvous, SCIENTISTS Said, Work THE Amassing HAS BEEN Happening FOR AGES. SHENCK Said THE Frozen PARTICLES THEMSELVES ARE Absolutely Noble AND Very soon A Division OF A MILLIMETER IN Stack. "THIS WOULD Supply FOR THE FIN-EST POW-DER A SKIER Can Hope FOR," HE Said. CASSINI IS By the side of TO Action BY THE MOON Anew ON OCT. 19 AT AN Distance from the ground OF All over the place 765 MILES.
SOURCE: Conglomerate Company Time
From a distance, most of the Saturnian moon Dione resembles a bland cueball. Thanks to close-up images of a 500-mile-long (800-kilometer-long) mountain on the moon from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found more evidence for the idea that Dione was likely active in the past. It could still be active now.
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The Cassini spacecraft swooped in for a close-up of the cratered, fractured surface of Saturn's moon Dione in this image taken during the spacecraft's Jan. 27, 2010, non-targeted flyby [Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute]"
"A picture is emerging that suggests Dione could be a fossil of the wondrous activity Cassini discovered spraying from Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus or perhaps a weaker copycat Enceladus," said Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who leads the Cassini science team that studies icy satellites. "There may turn out to be many more active worlds with water out there than we previously thought."
Other bodies in the solar system thought to have a subsurface ocean -- including Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa -- are among the most geologically active worlds in our solar system. They have been intriguing targets for geologists and scientists looking for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the solar system. The presence of a subsurface ocean at Dione would boost the astrobiological potential of this once-boring iceball.
Hints of Dione's activity have recently come from Cassini, which has been exploring the Saturn system since 2004. The spacecraft's magnetometer has detected a faint particle stream coming from the moon, and images showed evidence for a possible liquid or slushy layer under its rock-hard ice crust. Other Cassini images have also revealed ancient, inactive fractures at Dione similar to those seen at Enceladus that currently spray water ice and organic particles.
The mountain examined in the latest paper -- published in March in the journal Icarus -- is called Janiculum Dorsa and ranges in height from about 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers). The moon's crust appears to pucker under this mountain as much as about 0.3 mile (0.5 kilometer).
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This image, which is composed of data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the topography of a mountain known as Janiculum Dorsa on the Saturnian moon Dione. Color denotes elevation, with red as the highest area and blue as the lowest [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Brown]"
"The bending of the crust under Janiculum Dorsa suggests the icy crust was warm, and the best way to get that heat is if Dione had a subsurface ocean when the ridge formed," said Noah Hammond, the paper's lead author, who is based at Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Dione gets heated up by being stretched and squeezed as it gets closer to and farther from Saturn in its orbit. With an icy crust that can slide around independently of the moon's core, the gravitational pulls of Saturn get exaggerated and create 10 times more heat, Hammond explained. Other possible explanations, such as a local hotspot or a wild orbit, seemed unlikely.
Scientists are still trying to figure out why Enceladus became so active while Dione just seems to have sputtered along. Perhaps the tidal forces were stronger on Enceladus, or maybe the larger fraction of rock in the core of Enceladus provided more radioactive heating from heavy elements. In any case, liquid subsurface oceans seem to be common on these once-boring icy satellites, fueling the hope that other icy worlds soon to be explored -- like the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto -- could have oceans underneath their crusts. NASA's Dawn and New Horizons missions reach those dwarf planets in 2015.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, England, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Hammond's work was funded through a NASA Outer Planets Research grant.
For more information about Cassini, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
"Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory [May 29, 2013]"
