Daily Archives: April 28, 2015

Possible Messages from Aliens?

Recently, the search for alien life has become more and more prevalent in astronomy during this past century. New fields, such as astrobiology, have formed. Theories and formulas focused on the search for alien life, such as the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, have become widely known. Messages for possible intelligent life have been […] Continue reading

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Looking to the Future

Coming into college, I was excited to finally be able to take astronomy courses to satisfy my science requirements, since I had always had a mild interest in space. Taking ASTR 102 in my fall semester opened my eyes to just how extensive the universe was, and what an incredible way in which it developed.… Continue reading Looking to the Future Continue reading

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NASA’s NExSS Project to Lead the Way for the Search for Alien Life

NASA is currently assembling a group that it plans to call the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), which will be a group of specialists from various scientific fields in hopes to study the nature of exoplanets and figure out if some might be suitable for life. Currently the project has garnered support among planetary and […] Continue reading

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Necessities of life

In looking at what planets can sustain life, one requirement always includes liquid water. From this we can narrow down our searches to a solar system’s habitable zone, which is the region surrounding a star capable of supporting liquid water. But are we limiting ourselves too much in our searches? What if life was capable […] Continue reading

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Terraforming Mars

Everyone seems so caught up on finding extraterrestrial life. I think rather than focus on finding others, carving out our own “space footprint” seems so much more exciting. If you’ve seen the 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel, you would have been introduced to the concept of terraforming. The remnants of the Kryptonian race wish […] Continue reading

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Stellar classification

The stellar classification classifies stars based on their spectral characteristics. When passing through a prism, light from a star will be split into a spectrum displaying rainbow of colors interspersed with absorption lines. The strength of each line indicates the abundance of a specific ion. The abundance of different ions varies with the temperature of… Continue reading

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