NASA can’t keep it secret if it shows up on Google! – Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life?and they’ve set their sights on some very unearthly planets?and it turns out there are LOTS of them! But if we DO find life on other planets, there’s a strong chance the general public will never hear about it.

NASA scientists are looking for cold “Super-Earths,” which are giant, “snowball” planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems and which could potentially support some kind of life. Such planets are plentiful; experts estimate that one-third of all solar systems contain super-Earths.
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Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Astronomers have discovered intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space that could be the basis of ANOTHER life form.

An international team of astronomers thinks that extraterrestrial life forms may exist inside particles of interstellar dust. If life exists there, it would be a different FORM of life from the kind found on earth, which is all carbon-based. Under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into structures that can then interact with each other in ways that only the organic compounds we are familiar with usually do.
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In a report titled ?Signs of Life,? a multidisciplinary group of scientists talk about techniques and technologies that can be used to detect evidence for extraterrestrial life on other worlds.

?The report is based on a workshop that brought together a healthy spectrum of senior experts and young researchers,? says Jonathan Lunine, professor of planetary science and physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. ?The discussion was vigorous and exciting. This is a different world of life detection than that in 1976, at the time of Viking.?
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Scientists looking at a star 150 light-years away with the Hubble Space Telescope found that a planet there contains sodium in its atmosphere. This demonstrates that it may be possible to search for the chemical signature of life on planets beyond the solar system.

?Suddenly, discussing searches for Earth-like planets seems quite reasonable,? says David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. ?This opens up an exciting new phase of extrasolar planet exploration, where we can begin to compare and contrast the atmospheres of planets around other stars.?
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