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Originally Posted by tooge

this was interesting news from yesterday
Odds of Life on Newfound Earth-Size Planet '100 Percent,' Astronomer Says Advertisement | ad info
.By Jeanna Bryner
Space.com
updated 9/30/2010 10:18:18 AM ET
Share Print Font: +-This story was updated at 8:58 p.m. ET.

An Earth-size planet has been spotted orbiting a nearby star at a distance that would makes it not too hot and not too cold comfortable enough for life to exist, researchers announced today (Sept. 29).

If confirmed, the exoplanet, named Gliese 581g, would be the first Earth-like world found residing in a star's habitable zone a region where a planet's temperature could sustain liquid water on its surface. [ Illustration of planet Gliese 581g.]

And the planet's discoverers are optimistic about the prospects for finding life there.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, during a press briefing today. "I have almost no doubt about it."

Greg Callaghan

From: The Australian

May 09, 2009 12:00AM
AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.

But when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.

Instead, he's spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.

Even if he picks up the signal again - he's been scouring the same co-ordinates of the night sky on an almost daily basis since - the scientific rule book dictates he'll need to get it peer-reviewed before he can take his announcement to the world. "And that is a lot of ifs," he concedes.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life has been boosted recently by the discovery last month of a rocky world not unlike our own, about 20 light years away, which its Swiss discoverers have dubbed Gliese 581e, the latest in a long line of planet discoveries during the past decade (350 and counting).

Although Gliese 581e is too close to its host sun to support life, it's the first planet believed to be rocky like our own, a kind of super-hot Earth quite unlike the long line of gas and ice giants discovered to date.

With the launch of NASA's Kepler space telescope in March, specifically designed to detect smaller Earth-like planets, astronomers are confident that the discovery of a blue planet, orbiting in the so-called Goldilocks zone, where liquid water can support life, is edging closer by the day. But it will still be up to ground-based telescopes to confirm the mass of the planet, as space-based telescopes such as the Kepler can only yield its approximate diameter.

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