Search results for "Extraterrestrial life"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Extraterrestrial confirmation of tree-ring dating
2014
Nitrogen Hydrate Cage Occupancy and Bulk Modulus Inferred from Density Functional Theory-Derived Cell Parameters
2021
International audience; Gas clathrate hydrate solid materials, ubiquitous in nature as found either on the ocean floor, permafrost on the Earth, or in extraterrestrial planets and comets, are also technologically relevant, for example, in energy storage or carbon dioxide sequestration. Nitrogen hydrate, in particular, is of great interest as a promoter of the kinetics of the methane replacement reaction by carbon dioxide in natural gas hydrates. This hydrate may also appear in the chemistry of planets wherever nitrogen constitutes the majority of the atmosphere. A fine understanding of the stability of this hydrate under various thermodynamic conditions is thus of utmost importance to asses…
Missions to Mars: Characterization of Mars analogue rocks for the International Space Analogue Rockstore (ISAR)
2013
International audience; Instruments for surface missions to extraterrestrial bodies should be cross-calibrated using a common suite of relevant materials. Such work is necessary to improve instrument performance and aids in the interpretation of in-situ measurements. At the CNRS campus in Orléans, the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers en région Centre (OSUC) has created a collection of well-characterised rocks and minerals for testing and calibrating instruments to be flown in space missions. The characteristics of the analogue materials are documented in an accompanying online database. In view of the recent and upcoming rover missions to Mars (NASA's 2011 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL…
On the astrobiological relevance of viruses in extraterrestrial ecosystems
2009
AbstractViruses are the dominant form of genetically reproducing entities on Earth. Yet, viruses are mostly neglected in the context of astrobiology due to their non-living nature. In this discussion it is considered whether viruses are likely to be transferred within bacterial endospores to other planetary bodies through lithopanspermia. Interestingly, it seems possible that ecosystems of panspermial origin might yield biospheres in which viruses are absent. The evolutionary pathway of life in these systems might differ significantly from the path observed on Earth. We hypothesize that the difference in the two potential ways for the emergence of life, those being panspermial or local orig…
Limits on diffuse fluxes of high energy extraterrestrial neutrinos with the AMANDA-B10 detector
2003
Data from the AMANDA-B10 detector taken during the austral winter of 1997 have been searched for a diffuse flux of high energy extraterrestrial muon-neutrinos, as predicted from, e.g., the sum of all active galaxies in the universe. This search yielded no excess events above those expected from the background atmospheric neutrinos, leading to upper limits on the extraterrestrial neutrino flux. For an assumed E^-2 spectrum, a 90% classical confidence level upper limit has been placed at a level E^2 Phi(E) = 8.4 x 10^-7 GeV cm^-2 s^-1 sr^-1 (for a predominant neutrino energy range 6-1000 TeV) which is the most restrictive bound placed by any neutrino detector. When specific predicted spectral…
Extraterrestrial Mössbauer Spectroscopy
2011
To understand the origin of the Solar system and the origin of Life itself is one of the longest standing goals of human thought. Our Sun and its planets have formed out of an interstellar cloud which collapsed due to gravitational forces, forming a disk shaped so-called protosolar nebula, with the young star in the centre. Such disk shaped and dust grain containing protosolar nebulae have been observed. One of them is surrounding the young star Beta pictoris [1, 2]. Silicates, carbon and metal grains, oxides and sulfides should have been present. One of the important elements with relatively high abundance is iron. It is believed that simple molecules, such as water (H2O), carbon monoxide …
A view of extraterrestrial soils
2009
International audience; The nature of soils on celestial bodies other than Earth is a growing area of research in planetary geology. However, disagreement over the significance of these deposits arises in part due to the lack of a unified concept and definition of soil in the literature. The pragmatic definition “medium for plant growth” is taken by some to imply the necessity of biota for soil to exist, and has been commonly adopted in the planetary science community. In contrast, a more complex and informative definition bases on scientific theory: soil is the (bio)geochemically/physically altered material at the surface of a planetary body that encompasses surficial extraterrestrial tell…
How Will We React to the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?
2018
How will humanity react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this topic abounds, but empirical research is practically non-existent. We report the results of three empirical studies assessing psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software. We examined language use in media coverage of past discovery announcements of this nature, with a focus on extraterrestrial microbial life (Pilot Study). A large online sample (N = 501) was asked to write about their own and humanity’s reaction to a hypothetical announcement of such a discovery (Study 1), and an independent, large online sampl…
What Is Life?
2014
Despite the difficulty of defining a living being, biological sciences have considerably advanced. Today many authors feel the need to revisit the issue of the definition of life, among other reasons, because we are very close to have a second example of life. This life will not be the direct result of more than 3,500 million years of evolution, but the outcome of a project of synthetic biology in a laboratory. The fact that evolution has explored only a small part of the possible may pave the way towards alternative artificial lives. Focusing on the nature of life makes us more critical with the Cartesian comparisons between cells and machines. At the same time, progress in synthetic biolo…
A Place for Life
2010
The belief in the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations starts from the so-called principle of mediocrity. This principle postulates that Earth is a normal planet that rotates around a normal star, which in turn is located in a normal galaxy. That is to say, there is nothing so special in our world as to make it unique. This is a logical conclusion, toward which we are guided by the successive “Copernican turns” that science has suffered throughout its long history, and which has removed us from the central position we once believed to occupy in the universe.