Thursday, June 18, 2009

Changing criteria for habitable planets and life forming 12 billion years ago

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - Astronomers searching for Earthlike planets often focus on the 'habitable zone' around stars – where the heat from the star is at the perfect level for liquid water to exist. New calculations indicate that planets close to their parent stars could experience tidal forces that limit the habitable zone and change the criteria habitable planets. See article.
g Life - are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements – those essential to life as we know it – might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form. See article.
g Cosmicus - After a gaseous hydrogen leak today forced NASA to scrub the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour for the second time, the space agency said it is now looking to try again in July. See article.
g Imagining - Ever wondered how all those traditional space-opera and epic-fantasy races - the pig-faced warriors, the smug bumheads, and all the rest - came up with their wonderfully clichéd alien vocabularies? It's not difficult; once you've mastered these basic rules, you'll be able to produce names and phrases just as stereotypical as theirs. See article.

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