The surprising history of the extraterrestrial-life debate

The surprising history of the extraterrestrial-life debate

Special to CosmicTribune.com  By R. Clinton Ohlers   The debate over the existence of extraterrestrial life has a surprisingly long history — one as old as the history of science itself. Astrophysicist and historian of science and religion, Parandis Tajbakhsh, recently summarized this history for the International Research Network for Science and Belief in Society. […]

NASA scientist: Tiny aliens of the non-carbon-based kind may have already visited Earth

NASA scientist: Tiny aliens of the non-carbon-based kind may have already visited Earth

Special to CosmicTribune.com It’s possible that extraterrestrials have already visited Earth and humans never even noticed, a NASA scientist said. “The size of the ‘explorer’ might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,” Professor Silvano P. Colombano of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California wrote in a recently published paper on SETI (search for […]

Scientists awed by surface detail from Pluto images: Flowing glaciers, ‘Hillary’ mountains

Scientists awed by surface detail from Pluto images: Flowing glaciers, ‘Hillary’ mountains

In its final farewell to Pluto, New Horizons … [sent] an image of exotic ice across the dwarf planet’s surface, revealing signs of recent geologic activity — something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. ‘We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,’ said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. […]

From Pluto with love: Towering ice mountains on a heart-shaped plain

From Pluto with love: Towering ice mountains on a heart-shaped plain

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ. / APL, Southwest Research Inst. A 50 mile (80 kilometer) trip across Pluto would cover the distance indicated by the scale bar/ The close-up of the icy world’s rugged equatorial terrain was captured when the New Horizons spacecraft was about 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) […]

Fastest ever spaceship blasted off in 2006, passed the moon in 9 hours and took a decade to reach Pluto

Fastest ever spaceship blasted off in 2006, passed the moon in 9 hours and took a decade to reach Pluto

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION], Ben Cooper Destination: Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft [atop a powerful Atlas V rocket] roared off its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA in 2006 toward adventures in the distant Solar System. The craft is the fastest spaceships ever launched by humans, having passed the Moon only […]

Excitement builds as Pluto flyby nears, a decade after launch

Excitement builds as Pluto flyby nears, a decade after launch

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] There’s a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto’s rusty red surface which scientists are seeing for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant body on its way toward a historic flyby on July 14. … Pluto [was] once considered the farthest planet in […]

True believers at NASA press search for ETs within two decades

True believers at NASA press search for ETs within two decades

NASA claims we’ll find aliens in the next 10 to 20 years – and now the agency is revving up its efforts to track them down. The group has put together a team of ‘extraterrestrial experts’ to see if any of the planets discovered outside our solar system are habitable. …The initiative, dubbed Nexus for […]

NASA: Astronomers think every star in Milky Way ‘has at least one planet’

NASA: Astronomers think every star in Milky Way ‘has at least one planet’

Cambridge, Mass – NASA predicts that 100 million worlds in our own Milky Way galaxy may host alien life, and space program scientists estimate that humans will be able to find life within two decades. Speaking at NASA’s Washington headquarters on Monday, the space agency outlined a plan to search for alien life using current […]

NASA’s Kepler finds small planet only 210 light years away

NASA’s Kepler finds small planet only 210 light years away

NASA’s Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun.   The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, […]