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SPARCS, a NASA-funded CubeSat mission led by Arizona State University, will monitor nearby red dwarf stars for flare activity and sunspots in order to assess their habitability:
In 2021, a spacecraft the size of a Cheerios box will carry a small telescope into Earth orbit on an unusual mission. Its task is to monitor the flares and sunspots of small stars to assess how habitable the space environment is for planets orbiting them.
The spacecraft, known as the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS for short, is a new NASA-funded space telescope. The mission, including spacecraft design, integration and resulting science, is led by Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE).
"This is a mission to the borderland of astrophysics and astrobiology," said Evgenya Shkolnik, assistant professor in SESE and principal investigator for the SPARCS mission. "We're going to study the habitability and high-energy environment around stars that we call M dwarfs."
[...] Because M dwarfs are so plentiful, astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone contains roughly 40 billion — that's billion with a B — rocky planets in habitable zones around their stars. This means that most of the habitable-zone planets in our galaxy orbit M dwarfs. In fact, the nearest one, dubbed Proxima b, lies just 4.2 light-years away, which is on our doorstep in astronomical terms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:06AM (1 child)
"Life" may be a low bar if we are talking about subsurface oceans.
http://www.newsweek.com/life-solar-system-likely-exists-and-more-common-we-think-780229 [newsweek.com]
There could be life [wikipedia.org] on Mars (interior ocean, not surface), Ceres, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, Titan (interior water ocean instead of hydrocarbon lake), Titania, Oberon, Triton, Pluto, etc.
I don't expect any complex space-faring civilization could form on ocean worlds or in cold subsurface oceans. If you can't even create fire or invent the wheel, you won't be building spaceships. That's not to say that there couldn't be intelligent dolphin-like life in some cases. Just that it would be very stuck, unable to develop further than language and maybe moving around some rock and ice chunks.
The tidal locking scenario with a thin ring around a planet supporting moderate temperatures seems plausible. But we need JWST or something bigger to confirm it.
Possibly, but it seems more like science fiction wanking than a plausible outcome. If they are intelligent enough to have reached a point of having collective goals and science, they should eventually figure out that invaders are life forms. Or at least that robotic probes are unusual. They may worship the invaders or probes as gods (ancient aliens!).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 16 2018, @02:20PM
I wouldn't expect that either. But I still wouldn't discount it. Looking at the early stages of planet earth, completely inhospitable to life, it is difficult to imagine how life could even develop. How would the first living cell happen? Of course by "first", I don't mean a single cell, I mean nearly identical cells, all forming in the chemical soup at about the same time, within, say, a window of several tens of millennia? Once that chemical soup, after long periods of time, with constant energy pumped into it from some strange nearby nuclear fusion source, forms the complex enough molecules that by coincidence it is possible for the right ones to come together to form the machinery of a cell. Seems highly unlikely. Less like something that should go in a science textbook, and more like something for a science fiction textbook. :-)
As the robotic probes leave, one droid drops his screwdriver. The native planet dwellers below rush to enshrine this sign from the gods that fell from the sky. A later robotic probe sees that in that spot, a gigantic monument has been erected. Perfectly in the shape of a screwdriver, with lettering meticulously reproduced down the length of the handle "PROPERTY OF SPACEX".
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.