James Webb Space Telescope (1 Viewer)

Life finds a way.


They found a fungus in Chernobyl growing near the reactors where the radiation levels were suspected to prevent anything to live there.

I was all excited when I say "eats radiation". What they really mean is it passivley absorbs radiation and converts it to energy. That could be useful of course. However I was hoping for something that activley accellerated the decay of radioactive isotopes and left non-hazardous metal. That would make nuclear power more pallitable for many.

It would be right up there with a plastic/microplastic solution.


Not a solution, but potentially useful.

 
Our concept of life is very limited.
Absolutley, life evolved on this planet, in line with the conditions of this planet. What we see as necessary is only because of our perspective.

Also.

Carbon is great as a primary component of life,but it is not the only common/reactive element that could fill that purpose.

So many of our assumptions are based on C,H,N,O life and a range of temperatures.

Water would seem to be necessary given CHNO chemistry and it being liquid in the temperature range required... but change the building blocks or the temperature range and other liquids can fill in.

We have shown that the makeup of DNA can have subistituted chemicals vs our expectations, our cellular resperation producing adenosine triphosphate is not the only biological chemical reaction that could produce a compound providing energy for life, not by far.


All of the above assumes life is terrestial, with a cellular base, and a single physical "body" containing it. None of which are assumptions we can take for granted IMO.
 
I think I've read that planets around red dwarves would have other, more substantial obstacles to the formation of life. I think the planets would have to be in tidal lock and would suffer from extreme radiation (just my vague memory, so those might be wrong)
That's right - red dwarves (90% of planets) are cooler, so to be in the goldilocks zone in terms of temperature, the planet needs to be closer, which means more radiation. This does not rule out life, it just means it must be different. Also, with more mutations, evolution could happen faster.
 
Scientists have uncovered a new technique for detecting Earth-like alien worlds — and signs of potential alien life — with astronomy’s newest tool: the James Webb Space Telescope.

In a new paper detailed in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available online on the academic preprint server Arxiv, astronomers from multiple institutions show how the Webb telescope could detect the heat signatures of exoplanets around white dwarfstars by analyzing the light of those stars, and never detecting the planets directly.

Going further, they show Webb could detect signatures of potential alien life, such as large quantities of oxygen and methane appearing together, in the spectral information of an exoplanet’s light.

If applied, the new technique could allow astronomers to detect habitable, and possibly inhabited exoplanets within about 32 light years of Earth.

“The catch is that we don't know of any terrestrial exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs,” Mary Anne Limbach, a PhD student in astronomy at Texas A & M University and lead author of the paper told The Independent in an interview.

Astronomers will first need to use the new technique “to detect white dwarf exoplanets, and then, if we find any, we can perform longer follow-up observations to look for biosignatures.”……

 
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Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope has once again shed new light on an old space image. This time, it’s revealed exquisite details and scores of newborn stars in an image of a distant nebula made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s.

In the new image released by the Space Telescope Science Institute on Wednesday, three main columns of orange-russet gas appear sheathed in blue auras against a backdrop sea of gem-like stars……


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The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its second revelatory image in as many days.

Scientists using the observatory have discovered a tightly-packed "knot" of at least three galaxies that were forming around a quasar 11.5 billion years ago, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang.

The telescope's near-infrared spectrograph not only showed that the galaxies were orbiting each other at high speeds (up to 435 miles per second), but that this one of the most dense known areas of early galaxy formation.

The density is unusually high enough that lead researcher Dominika Wylezalek suggested there may even be two "halos" of dark matter merging in this area..........

 
The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its second revelatory image in as many days.

Scientists using the observatory have discovered a tightly-packed "knot" of at least three galaxies that were forming around a quasar 11.5 billion years ago, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang.

The telescope's near-infrared spectrograph not only showed that the galaxies were orbiting each other at high speeds (up to 435 miles per second), but that this one of the most dense known areas of early galaxy formation.

The density is unusually high enough that lead researcher Dominika Wylezalek suggested there may even be two "halos" of dark matter merging in this area..........

All hail our Black Hole overlords!
 

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