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Astronomy Professor @Cornell University, Director of the Carl Sagan Institute @CSInst, Searching for life in the universe #exoplanets, #astrobiology, #astronomy find me @KalteneggerLisa
Lisa Kaltenegger is among the scientists hoping to find evidence of life on worlds that orbit stars beyond our sun
The news that we'll soon have an unclassified report sent to Congress on "unidentified aerial phenomena" - commonly known as "UFOs" - has sparked widespread interest in the search for life in the universe. Might there be civilizations out there? Could there be technologically advanced extraterrestrials? If so, how can we find them?
For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection.
Astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger is searching for biomarkers on worlds beyond our Solar System
Somewhere out there are other Earths. Lisa Kaltenegger has a way to find them.
Press: Latest Research
How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life? A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery. "Super-Earth" LP 890-9c, also referred to as SPECULOOS-2c, is offering valuable information concerning the conditions at the inner boundary of a star's
The exoplanet LP 890-9c resides near the inner edge of its star's habitable zone, and if conditions are favorable it could potentially support liquid water and life.
Un exoplaneta descubierto recientemente puede ser clave para resolver el misterio de hasta qué punto...
Un exoplaneta puede revelar claves sobre el límite de la habitabilidad - LA NACION
Außerirdische, Alzheimer, Asiatische Hornisse: Die Lese-Empfehlungen der Woche aus der Wissenschaftsredaktion des SPIEGEL.
subscribe to Short Wave podcast Right now, a couple of planets about as massive as Earth are orbiting a dim star that's just a dozen light-years away from us. Those planets could be cozy enough to potentially support life.
For decades, humans have researched and wondered about life beyond Earth. Scientists have now created a list of planets where, if they exist, curious aliens could view Earth. The scientists reported that there are 1,715 star-systems that could have spotted Earth since about 5,000 years ago.
The news that we'll soon have an unclassified report sent to Congress on "unidentified aerial phenomena" -- commonly known as "UFOs" -- has sparked widespread interest in the search for life in the universe. Might there be civilizations out there? Could there be technologically advanced extraterrestrials? If so, how can we find them?
For decades, humans have researched and wondered about life beyond Earth. Scientists have now created a list of planets where, if they exist, curious aliens could view Earth. The scientists reported that there are 1,715 star-systems that could have spotted Earth since about 5,000 years ago.
Are we being watched right now by alien civilisations using similar technology to ours? According to a new paper published today in Nature today, 29 potentially habitable worlds have a "cosmic front seat" to watch us and could have both detected Earth as a life-supporting planet and received human-made radio waves from us.
Feeling like you are being watched? It could be from a lot farther away than you think. Astronomers took a technique used to look for life on other planets and flipped it around - so instead of looking to see what's out there, they tried to see what places could see us.
In the search for extraterrestrial life, we're usually the ones doing the snooping. But Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University, wanted to know who out there might be watching us. "For whom would we be the aliens?" she asks.
Astronomers on Earth can discover far away planets by watching the light of distant stars and waiting to see if that light ever wavers as an orbiting alien world passes by. But as Nadia Drake reports for National Geographic , a new study turns a hypothetical extraterrestrial telescope back on Earth.
On June 25 the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released their much hyped report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. Space alien enthusiasts and skeptics alike awaited it with bated breath. And while the report did not rule out an extraterrestrial origin for much of the documented UAP, it was short on details or bombshells.
Astronomers on Earth can look for alien worlds by watching the transit of planets orbiting distant stars, but scientists have now identified 2,034 nearby star systems that could peer right back at us. Of these, 1,715 could have spotted Earth since human civilisation blossomed about 5,000 years ago, and 319 more will see us over the next 5,000 years.
For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back. In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.
Si hay vida en otros planetas con una inteligencia y una capacidad tecnológica similar a la nuestra lo más probable es que ya hayan visto la Tierra, que nos estén viendo en este momento o que en un futuro astronómicamente próximo nos podrán ver.
NEWS STORIES: Research
While the search for exoplanets has revealed more than 4,000 planets beyond our solar system, researchers question what may be looking back. Astronomers compiled a list of stars that could host exoplanets positioned to see Earth and evidence of life.
They have noticed something intriguing coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri. Last month, as 2020 drew to a close and we on Earth completed one of our strangest orbits around the sun, news broke that astronomers had picked up a mysterious signal from another star.
Here on Earth, where we're focused on looking outward, we scour the universe for potentially habitable planets located outside our solar system. But what if we turned the search around? What exoplanets out there might be looking at Earth for signs of life?
The next generation of telescopes could soon allow astronomers to examine worlds orbiting dead stars for signs of life. Planets orbiting white dwarfs should be dead - at least one star in their system ran out of fuel and collapsed before expanding back outward, swallowing any nearby worlds.
From observations of planets forming around nascent stars to planets circling dead white dwarf remnants of stars like our own, astronomy gives us the tools to look into both our distant past and far future.
Astronomers are seeking to understand the types of exoplanets, and their atmospheric and environmental conditions, that could potentially host life outside of our solar system. And what they're discovering could broaden the search for life.
Life on alien planets may produce a protective glow to buffer the dangerous flares of nearby stars. Stars constantly douse their planets with harsh ultraviolet radiation flares, which could harm any life on a planet's surface. However, some forms of life may have developed a defense against these powerful bursts: a protective glow known as biofluorescence.
Astronomers say potential life on planets around flaring stars might find a creative way to survive. It takes more than four years for its light to reach us, but Proxima Centauri is one of our closest neighbors. The star orbits in the constellation Centaurus, visible in the Southern Hemisphere, but is itself too faint to see with the naked eye.
Shedding new light on the search for life in the cosmos. The use of ultraviolet light flares from red suns and a fluorescent glow may provide astronomers with vital life signs in the universe.
Detecting signs of life at a distance is a complicated business. But two Cornell University astronomers have advanced the cause with new computer models designed to help tease out signs of life from an extrasolar planet's given color and surface reflectivity.
Despite our best efforts, humanity has yet to find the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. So, we've decided to cheat. Astronomers at Cornell University have created what they call a "cosmic cheat sheet," utilizing nature's color palette from the early days of the planet in an effort to better find alien planets that could potentially host life.
CBS News What was once considered pure fantasy in movies like "Avatar," is now looking a little more plausible. Earlier this week, NASA announced the discovery of a possible Earth-like planet, located just 31 light years away - a hop, skip and a jump in cosmic terms - that may be able to support life.
Astronomers announced Wednesday that they had discovered the nearest potentially habitable planet outside our solar system. The newfound exoplanet - a so-called super-Earth named GJ 357 d - lies 31 light-years away from our solar system. It's about six times more massive than our planet and orbits in its host star's habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form on the surface.
The planet, not in our solar system, orbits a dwarf sun New telescopes should reveal whether the planet is rocky or has oceans The possibility of Earth-like conditions has scientists excited A potentially habitable 'super-Earth' has been discovered just 31 light-years away from our solar system, astronomers announced Wednesday.
This is what will happen when our sun dies: First, the hydrogen-powered nuclear reactor in its center will run out of fuel. The sun will expand into a red giant, swelling to 100 times its size and swallowing Mercury, Venus and perhaps even our own planet, along with all life as we know it.
Solar systems in the midst of their death throes may offer planetary scientists a chance to search for surface life on their far-flung surface moons, says a new paper.
Prior to 1995, the year the first exoplanet was discovered, we only knew that there were planets in our solar system. Nearly two decades later and 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered. There are nearly 3,000 more possible candidates. NASA estimates since the exoplanet's first discovery, the number of known exoplanets has doubled every 27 months since.
NASA's planet-hunting TESS mission has only been surveying the sky since July, but it's already making incredible discoveries.
Astronomers have created a catalog of 1,822 nearby stars around which the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission might spot planets receiving Earth-like levels of starlight. This is a crucial step in humanity's search for an Earth-like, potentially habitable exoplanet.
Life probably exists beyond Earth. So how do we find it? With next-generation telescopes, tiny space probes, and more, scientists aim to search for life beyond our solar system—and make contact.
Earth's history could be useful to help spot planets where vegetation may exist, potentially showing signs of life, new research says. The new study, published by researchers from Cornell University, details something they call a "template for vegetation fingerprints" to figure out the age of potentially habitable exoplanets.
To find signs of plant life on other worlds, it helps to understand the history of our own. Astronomers remotely detected signs of life on a planet for the first time in history in December 1990.
"Once we figure out, or I hope we figure out, that we are not alone in the universe, the connection to the cosmos is just going to be even stronger."
Just before it became the first man-made vessel to leave the solar system, in 1990, Voyager 1 took a portrait of Earth, some four billion miles away. Our pinprick of a planet occupied a mere twelve per cent of one pixel, but its atmosphere, rich in water, oxygen, and ozone, reflected and scattered the glow of the sun in an unmistakable way; the astronomer Carl Sagan dubbed Earth the "pale blue dot."
If alien astronomers are out there searching for signs of life on Earth, they might just find it in the telltale pattern of light reflected by our plants, from redwood forests to desert cacti to grass-covered plains. That reflected fingerprint has been visible since vegetation first began carpeting our rocky terrestrial landscape about half a billion years ago.
By searching for the telltale, periodic dimming of light from distant stars, astronomers can spot orbiting exoplanets tens to hundreds of light-years away. But how do they know what these bodies look like? Perhaps they first try to imagine how the planets in our own Solar System might appear to a faraway alien world.
The first step in searching for life beyond Earth is finding a planet that orbits a star, said Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium. "That, as difficult as it is, is the easiest part of the job," he said.
In this dark future, we might build enormous space power plants around black holes, lowering masses toward them to harvest their gravitational pull "like the weights pulling down in a grandfather's clock," says Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott.
When scientists train their telescopes on the sky in search of Earth-like planets, they tend to look around younger, sun-like stars. The logic seems sound: So far, our solar system is the only one where life has ever been found. If living things exist elsewhere, it seems logical they'd be found under conditions not too different from our own.
Astronomers said Thursday that they had found the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1,200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra.
VIDEOS: Interviews, IMAX, Radio
Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and works from Sagan's old office. In this episode of The Space Show, she reveals how we may be just a few years away from answering humanity's greatest question: are we alone in the universe?
Dean Lecture interview: Should we be afraid of extraterrestrial contact? Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger doesn’t think so. In this week’s interview from the Dean Lecture archives, she discusses where we might look for life in the Universe and what to do if we find it.
Cornell astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger and Lehigh University's Joshua Pepper have identified 1,004 main-sequence stars – similar to our sun – that might contain Earth-like planets in their own habitable zones within about 300 light-years of here, which should be able to detect Earth’s chemical traces of life.
Carl Sagan Institute Fellows discuss the science behind National Geographic's new series 'Cosmos: Possible Worlds'. This week, Prof. Lisa Kaltenegger, Prof. James Cordes, and Dr. Mark Sarvary discuss 'The Man of a Trillion Worlds'.
Is there life in the universe beyond planet Earth? It's the question everyone, including Alan Alda, wants to understand. In this episode, Alan asks Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, the head of the world-renown Carl Sagan Institute, about life in the cosmos. What Dr. Kaltenegger has to say is surprising and inspiring. Before you stare up at the sky tonight, be sure to hear what Dr. Kaltenegger has to say about which of the billions of planets might be more like ours than we ever thought possible.
Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, explains why studying bioluminescence on Earth can guide the way humans search for life on other planets.
NASA astronaut Nicole Stott has yet to meet an alien, but that doesn’t mean she’s never pondered their existence. Alien life has been a mainstay and fascination of science fiction, but who–or what–might actually be out there: biological life, artificial intelligence, or some combination of both? It took only 200,000 years—a blip on the cosmic timeline—for the first sparks of intelligent life to invent artificial intelligence here on Earth. And since space is big, and life is short—at least...
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered over the past two decades. In this lecture, Dr. Kaltenegger discussed these discoveries and explored how we can determine which of these exoplanets might be suitable for life. She also discussed techniques and missions that could detect life itself on these worlds, finally answered the question,”Are we alone in the Universe?”
Astronomers have already found thousands of planets that orbit their own stars. Some are at a distance where it's neither too hot nor too cold for life to exist. With new, bigger telescopes being built, astronomers will be able to analyze the chemical composition of these planets' atmospheres to determine whether Earth is the only planet of its kind in the universe.
Journey from the depths of the Pacific Ocean into the far reaches of space on a quest to find something that changes everything...signs of life, somewhere else in the universe. With cutting-edge imagery from the world's most powerful telescopes, The Search for Life in Space, a film for IMAX® and giant screen theatres, narrated by Malcolm McDowell takes audiences from the surface of Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, to the extreme lava fields of Hawaii and thermal vents deep...
Aspen Ideas: Discussion on Why we explore space
For the first time in human history, we have the technology to search for life and, if it’s there, to find it. Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute, shares what inspires her scientific curiosity, and how Cornell’s scientists work together to search for alien life in a new—and colorful—way. Kaltenegger's research focuses on the characterization of habitable worlds.
BREAKING THE WALL TO THOUSANDS OF NEW WORLDS How Exoplanet Research is Scouting for Earth 2.0
Out of the countless planets that exist, every fifth planet orbiting stars similar to our sun has the potential to host life. Astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows us how we can use the ‘fingerprint’ of a planet -- the light patterns created by its gravitational pull -- to understand the type of atmosphere that exists on it. Perhaps finding life on another planet is closer than we think? TEDArchive presents previously unpublished talks from TED conferences. Enjoy this unedited talk by Lisa...
The basic premise behind each installment of writer and director David Twohy's sci-fi film trilogy-Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick-is pretty straightforward. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, finds himself on a hostile alien planet inhabited by creatures that want to kill him. To add flare to what otherwise could become a tired storyline, ...