The Crowded Universe: The Race to Find Life Beyond Earth (Black and White Edition)
Alan Boss
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0465020399
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Crowded Universe, renowned astronomer Alan Boss argues that based on what we already know about planetary systems, in the coming years we will find abundant Earths, including many that are indisputably alive. Life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe, Boss argues—it is common.
Boss describes how our ideas about planetary formation have changed radically in the past decade and brings readers up to date on discoveries of bizarre inhabitants of various solar systems, including our own. America must stay in this new space race, Boss contends, or risk being left out of one of the most profoundly important discoveries of all time: the first confirmed finding of extraterrestrial life.
3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Martian Outpost: The Challenges of Establishing a Human Settlement on Mars
Escape Velocity (Warlock Series, Book 0)
The New Space Race: China vs. USA
frequency of Earth-like planets that the Survey considered a prerequisite for “starting” TPF. Knowing this frequency would also be important for choosing the optimal design for TPF: if Earths were commonplace, then TPF need search only the closest stars to find some, whereas if Earths were relatively rare, TPF would have to be able to search much deeper in space, and so might require a different design. JPL planned to “start” TPF by 2007 with a launch planned for 2014. Cost estimates varied
for a solar-mass star. The implications were breathtaking. This new scenario implied that there was a good chance that our own Solar System had formed in a region where stars formed in huge clusters along with massive stars. The ultraviolet light from the massive stars could have converted the outermost planets from gas giants into Uranus and Neptune, whereas Jupiter would complete its evolution into a gas giant, unmolested by ultraviolet radiation. Saturn would be an intermediate case, losing
at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Alan Stern, director of the Southwest Research Institute’s Department of Space Studies in Boulder, Colorado. Marsden’s Center is charged with keeping track of the myriad minor planets, the denizens of the Kuiper Belt, and anything else that is found wandering dazed around the Solar System pushing a shopping cart. Stern was the leader of NASA’s first robotic mission to Pluto, New Horizons, already launched and slated to
Webb. Without missing a beat, Griffin announced that Ed Weiler would leave his position as director of Goddard and return to NASA headquarters to run SMD, a directorate somewhat expanded from the one Weiler had been demoted from by O’Keefe in 2004. Weiler was one of the architects of NASA’s plans for searching for habitable worlds, from Kepler to SIM to the two TPFs. Planet hunters could not ask for a better head of SMD than Ed Weiler. Weiler’s appointment was only an interim appointment, but
Program OGLE Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment OSI Orbiting Stellar Interferometer PLANET Probing Lensing Anomalies Network SIM Space Interferometry Mission SIM-PH Space Interferometry Mission-Planet Hunter SM Servicing Mission SMD Science Mission Directorate (NASA) SOFIA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy SST Spitzer Space Telescope TOPS Towards Other Planetary Systems TPF Terrestrial Planet Finder TrES Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey UBC University of British
