On Thursday, NASA announced the discovery an exoplanet that is similar to Earth in terms of size, solar orbit, and the size of its sun. This has sparked news reports that exoplanet Kepler 452 may host extraterrestrial life. The Guardian released a story titled “Is Kepler 452b humanity’s best chance to find alien life?” while…
NASA astronomers yesterday released a paper announcing the discovery of an additional 768 exoplanets using a new validation technique for data from the Kepler Space Telescope. This has nearly doubled the number of confirmed exoplanets from the previous tally of 941 to 1710. Most dramatically, the number of earth sized exoplanets increased by a factor…
Scientists at the University of Aberdeen and University of St Andrews, Scotland, have concluded that extraterrestrial life is far more prevalent than previously thought. In a paper titled “Circumstellar habitable zones for deep terrestrial biospheres,” released in the journal, Planetary and Space Science, they have redefined the “Goldilocks Zone”, the optimal zone for life…
Edinburgh University is set to launch a series of six free online courses in Autumn 2012, one of which is titled: “Introduction to Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life”. The course involves five lectures to be presented online and will result in a certificate to all that complete it. Edinburgh is teaming up with…