STEPHEN Hawking is leading an investigation into whether the first object ever to arrive from OUTSIDE our solar system is a spaceship from an alien civilisation.
Are you there, aliens? It’s us, Earth. Astronomers have sent a radio message to a neighbouring star system – one of the closest known to contain a potentially habitable planet – and it’s nearby enough that we could receive a reply in less than 25 years.
A $100 million search for intelligent aliens has spied 15 bizarre, repeating flashes of light coming from a distant galaxy.
Astronomers say they’ve detected “strange signals” coming from the direction of a small, dim star located about 11 light-years from Earth.
In 1977, scientists working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) recorded an unusually strong radio signal, the origin of which many scientists believe has not been explained. While the most exotic theory is that the signal is a call from ET, a paper published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences claims the origins of the signal is much more mundane. They think a comet or two caused it. SETI scientists, including the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, and the man who discovered the signal, disagree.
Do you speak alien? For years radio telescopes have been listening to the cosmos in the hope of picking up an alien message. We have had no luck yet, so while we wait René Heller organised a trial run. He simulated receiving a message from outer space and then challenged the general public to decrypt it.
The latest response to the Fermi paradox.
The astro-biologist Paul Davies of Arizona State writes in The Eerie Silence “I think that biological intelligence is a short-lived phenomenon. If we ever face artificial intelligence, I believe it is post-biological in nature”.
Last year, a single star found fame. It consistently made headlines and even appeared on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert.” The star (often referred to as Tabby’s star) is located 1,200 light-years away toward the constellation Cygnus and has been inexplicably flickering and fading by such large amounts that it cannot be easily explained by natural causes.
The dwarf planet Ceres is cloaked in a layer of asteroid dust that disguises its true surface composition, a new study suggests.
