E.T. Is Coming! Science Channel Series Explores Possible Alien Invasion

A new cable television series premiering tonight (March 5) reveals a fresh take on how aliens could invade Earth.

The Science Channel's "Are We Alone?" is a two-part miniseries that uses expert testimony and some creative science fiction to explore how a technologically advanced species could travel to Earth and invade the planet.

"It's like nothing you've seen before," Hakeem Oluseyi, a Florida Institute of Technology astrophyscist interviewed in the series, told SPACE.com.

"Are We Alone?" chronicles an alien invasion from start to finish. Interstellar travelers arrive on Earth, dropping capsules that begin multiplying when they reach the surface of the planet. "Are We Alone?" attempts to explore every aspect of the invasion, from how the biological components could take over the Earth to how humans would react to the aliens.

Oluseyi thinks that an invasion is probably not the most likely way humanity will encounter aliens, however. For the most part, Earth was inhabited solely by single-celled organisms, until more complex life started taking over, Oluseyi said.

"Chances are that single-celled life is the type that's ubiquitous throughout the universe," Oluseyi said.

"Are We Alone?" kicks off a month of Science Channel programming devoted to the search for alien life. Another two-part series, called "Aliens: The Definitive Guide," details the work that scientists are doing to hunt for alien life.

Planet-hunting telescopes — like NASA's Kepler Space Telescope — are helping scientists understand that there are plenty of planets that could harbor life, Oluseyi added.

"We're at this point that we're finding things we always knew were there," Oluseyi said, citing Kepler's newest discoveries. "Life is the same way. We're pretty certain that it's there, but we haven't seen it yet."

There is even a possibility of some form of primitive extraterrestrial life in the solar system, Oluseyi said. Some moons of Jupiter, like Europa, are similar enough to Earth that they could harbor life. It's even possible that alien life has entered Earth's atmosphere through a process called "panspermia."

Some studies have shown that micro-organisms can survive the intense heat and pressure created by entry into an atmosphere, Oluseyi said.

Tonight's first episode of "Are We Alone?" called "The Invasion," premieres on the Science Channel at 10 p.m. ET (check local listings). The second episode, titled "The Offspring," premieres March 12.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. This article was first published on SPACE.com.

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Alien Planet Is Rolling Over, Forcing 4 Others to Do Same (SPACE.com)

Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com Contributor
Space.com Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor
space.com – Thu Dec 1, 6:00 pm ET

A huge alien planet turns super-slow somersaults as it hurtles through space, dragging its four sibling planets along for the topsy-turvy ride, a new study suggests.

The giant exoplanet, known as 55 Cancri d, gets tugged by a faraway companion star as it orbits its own parent star. As a result, the planet performs a flip over the course of millions of years, and the other four planets in the system follow suit, researchers said.

"It kind of shepherds along the other planets," study lead author Nathan Kaib, of Queen's University in Canada, told SPACE.com.

Widely swinging planet

Located about 40 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer (the Crab), the 55 Cancri system contains two stars, one with five planets in a seemingly stable orbit.  The other star is almost 1,100 times as far away from them as the sun is from Earth, but it still affects them. The effect is not on the planets' orbits but on their axes. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The axis of a planet runs through its center; the planet spins around it each day. The axes of most planets tend to line up more or less with the axis of their star. Most planets change the angle, or precess, slightly over time, but only a few swing significantly.

55 Cancri d is one of the swingers.

Kaib and his team ran more than 450 computer simulations of the 55 Cancri system, taking into account the influence of the companion star. The researchers decided that the spin axis of 55 Cancri d probably flips completely upside-down after millions of years. The planet's north pole finds itself pointed in the direction the south pole once claimed.

Even more intriguing, the planet, which is about four times the size of Jupiter, causes the smaller bodies in the system to swing with it.

The influence of the companion star was probably overlooked until now because it is so distant, Kaib explained.

"Other studies looking at the effect of binary stars on planets tend to focus on tighter binaries," he said.

Closer companions make for unstable orbits, but the 55 Cancri system showed no obvious sign of orbital disruption.

"This planetary system looks very well ordered," Kaib said.

Exactly how long it takes the planets to swing from top to bottom depends on the time it takes the two stars to circle one another. Unfortunately, that's tough to nail down, researchers said.

Kaib and his team modeled a variety of paths for the two stars and found that most of them resulted in severe axis shifts for all five planets.

The research was published in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Observational follow-up

In its solar system, 55 Cancri d is the most distant of the five planets from their sun — a little farther than the distance between Jupiter and the sun. Three others are packed into orbits closer than Mercury is to the sun.

The closest of the five, the dense planet 55 Cancri e, completes the orbit of its sun in less than 18 hours. From Earth's viewpoint, the tiny planet passes directly in front of its parent star, which is expected to allow astronomers to measure a number of properties, including the angle of its spin orbit.

At about 8.5 times the mass of Earth, 55 Cancri e would be the smallest planet on which astronomers have detected a spin angle.

Kaib says that he spoke with several other observers experienced in determining the angle for extrasolar planets, and they are confident that it's possible to calculate the spin axis angle of 55 Cancri e.

But Kaib cautions that the observational evidence may not be conclusive. The simulations model the star as a perfect sphere, but like most rotating bodies, it probably contains a bulge around its equator. The tidal forces from this bulge could act to erase evidence of the tipping of the orbital axis.

Astronomers compare the axis of the planets to the axis of the star to calculate just how much the planets have tipped.

"As the planets precess, they could drag the star along with it," Kaib said.

The orbital inclination of the star would then increase along with those of the planets, so the whole system could wind up on its head.

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Newfound Alien Planet Hot Enough to Melt Iron (SPACE.com)

Astronomers have found an alien planet not much bigger than Earth, but so blisteringly hot that life has no shot of gaining a foothold there.

The exoplanet, known as Kepler-21b, is just 1.6 times bigger than our home planet, making it a so-called "super Earth." But it orbits so close to its parent star that astronomers estimate its surface temperature to be about 2,960 degrees Fahrenheit (1,627 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to melt iron.

Researchers found Kepler-21b using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Kepler spots alien worlds using what's called the "transit method," which looks for telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses in front of the star's face from Kepler's perspective, and blocks some of its light.

Astronomers then confirmed Kepler-21b with the help of telescopes at Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Kepler-21b is located 352 light-years from Earth. Its mass is no more than 10 times that of our home planet, researchers said, but it sits just 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from its host star and takes 2.8 days to complete one orbit. Earth, for comparison, zips around the sun at a distance of 93 million miles (150 million km).

Kepler-21b's parent star, known as HD 179070, is 1.3 times more massive than the sun. HD 179070 is a little hotter and brighter than our star, researchers said, and a little younger, too. Astronomers estimate its age at 2.84 billion years, compared to 4.6 billion years for the sun.

HD 179070 cannot be seen by the unaided eye, but a small telescope can easily pick it out, researchers said.

Since its launch in March 2009, the $600 million Kepler spacecraft has identified 1,235 alien planet candidates. Kepler-21b is just the 26th of these to be confirmed by follow-up observations, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of the instrument's finds will end up being the real deal.

If that turns out to be the case, Kepler's discoveries will more than double the number of known alien planets, which currently stands at about 700. Astronomers think our Milky Way galaxy likely harbors billions of alien planets, though most are so far away that they'll be difficult for us to detect.

Researchers report the discovery of Kepler-21b in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

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Astronomers Discover 18 Huge New Alien Planets (SPACE.com)

Astronomers have found 18 new alien planets, all of them Jupiter-size gas giants that circle stars bigger than our sun, a new study reports.

The discoveries increase the number of known planets orbiting massive stars by 50 percent. The exoplanet bounty should also help astronomers better understand how giant planets form and grow in nascent alien solar systems, researchers said.

The haul comes just a few months after a different team of researchers announced the discovery of 50 newfound alien worlds, including one rocky planet that could be a good candidate for life. The list of known alien planets is now well over 700 and climbing fast.

Staring at 'retired' stars

The researchers surveyed about 300 stars using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and instruments in Texas and Arizona. They focused on so-called "retired" type A stars that are at least 1.5 times more massive than our own sun.

These stars are just beyond the main stage of life — hence the name "retired" — and are now ballooning out to become what's known as subgiant stars.

The team scrutinized these stars, looking for slight wobbles caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. This process revealed 18 new alien worlds, all of them with masses similar to Jupiter's. All 18 planets also orbit relatively far from their stars, at a distance of at least 0.7 times the span from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

Planet-formation theories

In addition to boosting the ever-growing alien planet tally, the new finds lend support to one of two theories that attempt to explain the formation and evolution of planets, researchers said.

This theory, called core accretion, posits that planets grow as gas and dust glom onto seed particles in a protoplanetary disk. Core accretion predicts that the characteristics of a planetary system — the number and size of planets, for example — depend strongly on the mass of the star.

The main competing theory, called gravitational collapse, holds that planets form when big clouds of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into clumps that become planets. According to this idea, stellar mass should have little impact on planet size, number and other characteristics.

As the exoplanet finds pile up, it seems that stellar mass does in fact play an important role. The 18 huge newfound alien worlds, which all orbit massive stars, add more evidence in support of core accretion, researchers said.

"It's nice to see all these converging lines of evidence pointing toward one class of formation mechanisms," study lead author John Johnson, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement.

Johnson and his colleagues reported their results in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

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Will We Really Find Alien Life Within 20 Years? (SPACE.com)

At a June 27 press conference, Russian astronomer Andrei Finkelstein said that extraterrestrials definitely exist, and that we're likely to find them within two decades.

"The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms," said Finkelstein, the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute in St. Petersburg. He was speaking at the opening of an international symposium on the search for extraterrestrial civilizations that was being held at the institute.

"There are fundamental laws which apply to the entire universe," Finkelstein was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. Because those fundamental laws allowed intelligent life to develop on Earth, they ought to engender intelligent life elsewhere, too, he reasoned.

Finkelstein pointed out that in recent years, astronomers have found more than 1,000 exoplanets —planets orbiting stars other than our own — some of which lie within their stars' "habitable zones," or the regions in which the temperature is right for water to exist as a liquid. Finkelstein said there will be life on such planets if there is water.

Furthermore, he conjectures that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a worldwide effort to detect radio and optical signals sent our way by extraterrestrials, will find examples of that life within two decades. (Some media sources have interpreted Finkelstein's words to mean that we will communicate back and forth with aliens within that time. Actually, he only said that we will detect their signals.)  [10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

For Finkelstein's striking prediction to come true, certain conditions must be met: There must be a planet with an alien civilization that is capable of transmitting high-power radio or optical signals our way. That civilization needs to exist within 20 light-years of Earth and have been broadcasting those signals starting today, or earlier, in order to reach Earth within 20 light-years of today. (Or, if the civilization is farther away, then it needs to have broadcast long enough ago that it could reach here within 20 years.)

Though detecting life elsewhere in the cosmos sounds difficult, as it turns out, several astronomers believe that Finkelstein's 20-year prediction is realistic. In fact, they have an equation that takes into account all the conditions that must be met in order to find life on other planets, and according to the equation, 20 years is a pretty good estimate for when we'll find it.

Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the most well-known SETI program, estimated that intelligent life would be found in 25 years in a paper he wrote five years ago. "Maybe Finkelstein read my paper," Shostak told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE. He agrees that we'll detect alien signals within two decades. [Earth's 10 Wildest Attempts to Contact Aliens]

One in a million

Shostak explained that the SETI Institute has aimed its radio telescopes at a few thousand star systems over the past 50 years. (They didn't detect any "deliberate signals" sent by aliens.)  Assuming that technology will continue to improve, he thinks we will be able to check out 1 million stars over the next two decades, and that one in that million will have a habitable planet that has intelligent life capable of transmitting signals that are strong enough for us to detect.

While other planets in that million may have had life that was broadcasting radio or optical waves sometime in the past (but which has since been wiped out by an asteroid or some other cataclysm), or will broadcast signals in the future, approximately one of them will be doing so at just the right moment for us to hear or see them.

Shostak's number, 1 in a million, follows from what is known as the Drake Equation. It is a formula created by Frank Drake (also of the SETI Institute) that takes various factors into account to determine the number of intelligent and signal-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy. Drake and Shostak both calculate that there are 10,000 such civilizations transmitting signals at any given moment. Because there are 100 billion stars in the galaxy, the math says 1 in 10 million stars will be sending radio signals our way. "Because you can throw out a lot of stars," Shostak said, making smart choices about which ones are likely to have life, we should be able to find someone or something by searching just 1 million stars.

"If we haven't succeeded once we've done 10 million or 100 million stars by around 2050, then we've grossly overestimated the strength of their transmitters, or some other factor," Shostak said. "One reason we could fail is that there's nobody out there, but I would consider that a last resort."

Candidate planets

SETI can narrow down its search by directing its attention to stars that astronomers discover to have planets in their habitable zones. So far, 1,235 exoplanets have been found by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, a probe that surveys regions of space, collecting data from stars and their planets which scientists then analyze. [How Do Astronomers Find Alien Planets?]

According to Bill Borucki, a planetary astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and the principal investigator of the Kepler mission, about 50 of the exoplanets that have been found so far are in their stars' habitable zones, and five of those could be rocky rather than gaseous. ("To have life, you probably have to have a solid surface to walk on," Borucki said.)

By induction — what's true of a subset of stars is likely to be true of the rest — "there must be on the order of a billion planets in our galaxy in the habitable zones of their stars," Borucki said. When he and his team identify habitable planets, they tell SETI to point its radio telescopes their way.

Borucki isn't as bold when it comes to specifying when life will be found, but he is optimistic: "I think there's a good chance that there's life in our galaxy. With so many habitable planets, it's hard to imagine that there wouldn't be. And I think that at some point we'll probably discover it. I hope that SETI does that soon."

Even more likely than finding intelligent life far off in the galaxy, Borucki thinks we'll find much simpler, bacterial life much closer to home. "NASA has a number of missions to Mars, and there may be primitive life there. They're talking about missions to Enceladus [a moon of Saturn] and Europa [a moon of Jupiter], both of which probably have subsurface oceans," he said. "I think those are wonderful places to look. I think we might find life in our solar system first."

The Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM), a mission to Jupiter and its icy moon, is proposed for a launch in 2020.

Little green men?

Finklestein made one other suggestion — that intelligent alien life forms would be humanoid. He reasoned that, because the laws of nature led life on Earth to evolve in the way it did, alien life forms would develop similarly. Like humans, they probably have two arms, two legs and a head, he said, adding that "they may have different color skin, but even we have that."

Are aliens really little green — or blue or red — men, as Hollywood and Finkelstein suggest?  Shostak doesn't think so. "All you have to do is go down to the zoo and look around. There aren't too many critters there that look a lot like us," he said. "The fact that we have two arms and two legs is a consequence of our evolutionary past: We happened to evolve from a four-lobed fish. Among critters on Earth, the most popular number of appendages is six, not four; they're called bugs."

Intelligent aliens probably do have heads and appendages, though. "Having a head seems to be a good thing. Lots of organisms have heads and it seems to be a very efficient model. Having appendages is also important," Shostak said. "If they were dolphins then they wouldn't build radio transmitters."

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.

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LIFE slideshow: NASA envisions alien worlds (The Newsroom)

For decades, NASA has delighted stargazers with pictures taken by astronauts, telescopes, and rovers across the galaxy -- photographic glimpses of real planets, moons, stars, and other heavenly bodies. When illustrators, meanwhile, stretch their imaginations -- giving shape and color to what, say, a sunrise on another world -- their work offers brilliant notions of what vistas beyond our tiny corner of space might look like. Captured by a camera or, as in this gallery, envisioned by artists, the far reaches of space continue to humble and amaze.

NASA/ JPL-Caltech

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In Hunt for Alien Planets, Frustration Lingers Over Canceled Missions (SPACE.com)

Geoff Marcy is mad.

Not mad as in 'crazy,' although many scientists thought he was nuts when he first started hunting for planets orbiting far-distant stars over 20 years ago. 

Now that over 500 exoplanets have been detected and the Kepler space telescope has over 1,200 candidate planets waiting to be confirmed, Marcy's dedication and hard work (and his sanity) have been vindicated.

But Marcy is still mad at NASA for canceling exoplanet missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). He's also angered by what he sees as a lack of leadership and cooperation for exoplanet missions within NASA and the larger astrophysics community. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

Marcy expressed his ire at a recent exoplanet symposium hosted by MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager."I'm unhappy about the last 10 years, and the next 10 years," he said.

Mission meltdowns

While the Kepler mission has been a huge success, and potentially will allow astronomers to discover a truly Earth-like planet, Marcy mourns the loss of other missions that would've helped characterize exoplanets, as well as find planets that Kepler could never detect.

"I think the case for TPF is more compelling thanks to Kepler," Marcy said.

The goal of TPF had been to study all aspects of exoplanets — according to a NASA web site, "from their formation and development in disks of dust and gas around nearly-forming stars, to their suitability as abodes of life."

Marcy criticized the 2010 astronomy and astrophysics Decadal Survey, an influential review complied by the National Research Council that recommends missions for space science over the next ten years.

"TPF was not even mentioned in the Decadal Survey," he said. "How is this possible?"

The previous Decadal Survey, released in 2001, had recommended that NASA proceed with TPF, with the caveat that astronomers first had to determine that terrestrial planets are common around sun-like stars. Data from Kepler and other exoplanet studiesindicate that this may in fact be the case. [Infographic: Stacking Up Alien Solar Systems]

Marcy said that part of the blame for the current lack of large exoplanet missions should be placed on the scientific community, which did not advocate more strongly for TPF. Not too long ago, TPF was considered the most important and exciting mission for exoplanet science.

"I think TPF is our human genome project,” said Marcy. Without such a mission to help identify exoplanet characteristics, planet hunters become census-takers, just as astronomers 100 years ago counted the stars and put them into star category plots. "Now we count planets and put them into a period/radius diagram," he said.

Marcy said the astronomy community lost 10 years due to internal squabbling over which missions should receive funding. TPF scientists battled SIM scientists for supremacy, and then in 2004, when NASA decided to split TPF into two different missions — one with a coronagraph (TPF-C) and one with an interferometer  (TPF-I) -- the problem only grew worse.

The coronagraph and interferometer each would block light from a star in order to detect any planets orbiting them.

The TPF-Interferometer would've had several small telescopes, either on a fixed structure or on separated spacecraft floating in formation, that looked for the infrared emission, or heat, from exoplanets. The TPF-Coronagraph would’ve used a single large mirror to collect the very dim reflected visible light from exoplanets.

In 2007, NASA deferred both TPF missions "indefinitely" due to budget constraints. 

"Free-flying interferometers in space are the only plausible future for astrophysics," Macy declared. He felt coronagraphs were not the best option, but noted that NASA saw it differently and supported TPF-C at the expense of other exoplanet missions. "Lots of interferometers and radial velocity missions got junked."

He said that some in the community, notably Roger Angel of the University of Arizona, had advocated for a cheaper, scaled-down version called TPF-Lite, but this was rejected because many feared it would eliminate motivation for a bigger TPF mission. 

"So now, we have nothing," said Marcy.

For awhile it looked like SIM was the last mission standing when it came to large-scale exoplanet missions after the cancelation of TPF. SIM would have surveyed the closest 100 stars, looking for planets of a few Earth-masses, using astrometry: the precise measurement of star movement caused by planetary orbits.

A scaled-down version, called SIM-Lite, wasnot recommended by the 2010 Decadal Survey for development.  Because of this, and despite the years of study and the $600 million NASA already had invested in the mission, SIM was canceled.

Marcy said there hasn't been any meaningful discussion about lessons learned after the downfall of TPF and SIM. 

"Where’s the insight?" he asked. "What's the culture that allows mistakes like this to happen?"

A house divided

Wesley Traub of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory seemed eager to address these criticisms. He jumped to his feet after Marcy spoke, and only reluctantly agreed to wait for the scheduled question-and-answer period.

Traub defended TPF-C, saying it had the advantage of being a single telescope that didn’t need to be cooled. However, he felt the switch in focus for TPF from interferometry to a coronograph was mainly due to perception than science. [Video: Kepler Reveals Lots of Planets: Some Habitable?]

Calling the history of exoplanet mission development a "sociology experiment," Traub said that interferometers were simply not popular -- they didn’t employ enough people, and students wanted to collect data, not dedicate their time to building a new instrument. 

But Traub, who worked on both SIM and TPF and is currently Chief Scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program, also shared many of Marcy’s concerns about the state of exoplanet missions. Speaking about the cancellation of SIM, Traub said, "That was the most embarrassing thing I've seen in my life."

David Charbonneau, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Kepler team member, spoke in support of the Decadal Survey. "If you're frustrated, read all the white papers."

Charbonneau said they reveal the caustic in-fighting that was taking place within the community which resulted in missions like SIM-lite not being recommended. Another problem, he said, was the lack of external cost evaluations, which could’ve helped in judging which missions were fiscally possible.

It was left to the symposium moderator, Sara Seager, to put in a good word for NASA, and she pointed out that the space agency had supported everyone gathered there that day. She also said that the current situation called to mind Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, "A house divided against itself shall not stand." 

Summing up the history of mission development, Seager said, "In exoplanets, we divided and got conquered."

The symposium, "The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets," took place May 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. This full day of talks also included discussions about astrobiology, Sara Seager's ExoPlanetSat, Geoff Marcy's call to send a mission to Alpha Centauri, and many other topics of relevance to exoplanets.

This story was provided to SPACE.com by Astrobiology Magazine. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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