Alien life.Įxperts have found the companion of Jupiter, which is about 90% the size of our own moon, to have signs of just the right chemical elements, such as carbon and hydrogen, to host living beings. It's simply because study after study continues to offer evidence that this frigid floating sphere has ultra-promising conditions to support life. The smallest of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, Europa is an extremely talked-about world in the science community. Why does Europa lead the quest to find aliens? 'This delivery brings us one step closer to launch and the Europa Clipper science investigation,' Jordan Evans, mission project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.įurther feeding the excitement, the agency even shared a mesmerizing time-lapse video of the Clipper being transported from its birthplace at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to the snowy-white clean rooms of of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman On Tuesday, NASA released a few long-awaited images of the Clipper's completed main body, calling this a 'huge milestone' for the ambitious mission.Įngineers and technicians inspect the main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. It's named the Clipper, and it's bound for Jupiter's icy moon Europa. It's the largest NASA spacecraft ever developed for a planetary mission, and in October 2024, it's scheduled to voyage toward an extraterrestrial world many scientists deeply believe could host alien life. It stands about as high as a regulation basketball hoop and will have solar arrays that, when extended, would fill an entire basketball court. It's an aluminum cylinder about the size of an SUV. It's a massive device that'll be programmed to fly by and investigate Jupiter's icy moon Europa, a foreign world that scientists think could host extraterrestrial life.

One opportunity might be to look for planets at the “outskirts of globular clusters.NASA has completed building the main body of the Europa Clipper spacecraft. The closest cluster is several thousand light years away, and given the crowding of stars, spotting a planet would be difficult. That means sending an interstellar probe is something a civilization at our technological level could do in a globular cluster.”įinding these planets, if they exist, will be hard. The Voyager probes are 100 billion miles from Earth, or one-tenth as far as it would take to reach the closest star if we lived in a globular cluster.

'Interstellar travel would take less time, too. 'Sending a broadcast between the stars wouldn't take any longer than a letter from the U.S. 'We call it the 'globular cluster opportunity,'' said DiStefano. In a cluster, a neighboring star could be 20 times closer. For example, the nearest star to our solar system is four light years away. The proximity of the stars in a cluster would offer any alien civilization a better chance to explore nearby stars. That could mean any planet in a cluster could survive for billions of years, giving life ample time to form and evolve. 'Once planets form, they can survive for long periods of time, even longer than the current age of the universe,' explains DiStefano. Any planets around those would be very close to its star, keeping it safe from stellar interlopers. Researchers counter with the notion that the stars in clusters tend to be relatively dim and long-lived red dwarf stars. This means there would be a better chance of another star’s gravity “disrupting” a potential planetary system. However, clusters contain fewer of the heavy elements needed for the formation of new planets, which leads some to think they are not the best place to look for alien life.In fact, researchers say only one planet has been spotted around a cluster.ĭiStefano argues that exoplanets have been found around stars “only one-tenth as metal rich as our Sun.” She also said that Earth-sized planets can form around metal rich or metal poor stars.Īnother reason to think clusters might not be the best place to find life is that because of the concentration of stars. There are about 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way, mostly on the outer areas.

'A globular cluster might be the first place in which intelligent life is identified in our galaxy,' said lead author Rosanne DiStefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) during the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Kissimmee, Florida. They’re also old, almost as old as the Milky Way, having formed about 10 billion years ago on average. The best place to look for alien life would be in globular star clusters, according to new research.Ĭlusters hold millions of stars - all within a relatively small area of around 100 light years across.

Nasa alien news 2014