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Are we Alone? - The Search for Life beyond the Earth.

Are we Alone? - The Search for Life beyond the Earth. Ian Morison Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Gresham College. Star-stuff. Ring Nebula. M1 The Crab Nebula. Elsewhere in our own Solar System. We could find other simple life-forms here. Canals on Mars?. The Face on Mars!.

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Are we Alone? - The Search for Life beyond the Earth.

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  1. Are we Alone? - The Search for Life beyond the Earth. Ian Morison Emeritus Professor of Astronomy Gresham College

  2. Star-stuff

  3. Ring Nebula

  4. M1The Crab Nebula

  5. Elsewhere in our own Solar System We could find other simple life-forms here.

  6. Canals on Mars?

  7. The Face on Mars!

  8. Valleys and Volcanoes

  9. Olympus Mons

  10. Islands and Channels

  11. Viking on Mars • Two Viking Spacecraft landed on Mars in 1976 to search for evidence of life.

  12. Spirit and Opportunity

  13. Martian Dust Devils

  14. Phoenix Lander

  15. Jupiter 4 major moons – discovered by Galileo Io Europa Ganymede Callisto

  16. Io

  17. Jupiter’s Moon Europa

  18. Breaking up of the surface • Icebergs!

  19. Water Plumes!

  20. Searching for Life!

  21. Finding Evidence of Simple Life on other Planets

  22. Can we see any exo-planets? A real problem due to the overwhelming brightness of the star orbited by the planet.

  23. Infrared observations by one of the KECK telescopes

  24. HR 8799 with three planets

  25. HST using a coronograph • The Hubble Space Telescope has observed a planet in orbit around the star Formalhaut.

  26. Indirect Detection Methods The RADIAL VELOCITY or DOPPLER WOBBLE method

  27. 51 Pegasi b • The first planet detected around a normal star. • Period just 4 days! • A gas giant very close to its star.

  28. Planetary Transits Detect the transit of a planet as it crosses the face of the star. This results in a slight drop in luminosity. This can only work if the orbital plane of the planet includes the Earth.

  29. HD 209458 transit

  30. HD 209458 b • 150 light years from Earth. • Planet orbits every 3.5 days. • 4 million miles from its star. • Atmospheric temperature ~2000K.

  31. Evidence for Life?

  32. We could detect evidence of life by observing the spectra of the planet’s atmosphere.

  33. Study the Infra-Red Spectrum

  34. What does it tell us?

  35. SETI The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

  36. The Seminal Paper • In 1959 Giuseppe Cocconi and Phillip Morrison published a paper in Nature in which they pointed out that given two telescopes of the size of the newly built 250ft Mk1 Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank it would, in principle, be possible to communicate across inter-stellar distances.

  37. They suggested that any search should target the nearest Sun-like stars as these live long enough and are hot enough to allow life a chance to evolve on a planet at a suitable distance from them. A target list was provided including TauCeti and Epsilon Eridani. Where to look? Locations

  38. Where to look? Frequency • They pointed out that the background noise (atmosphere, Galaxy, CMB etc.) was a minimum between ~1 to 10 GHz. • This band included the (radio) Hydrogen Line at 1.4 GHz and the OH Lines at ~ 1.6 GHz. • The band from 1.4 to 1.6 GHz is called the Water Hole

  39. Project Ozma • In 1960 Frank Drake and his colleagues at Green Bank, West Virginia, used the Tatel 85ft telescope to make the very first SETI observations in what was called Project Ozma.

  40. Project Ozma • They were given use of a new, state of art, low noise parametric amplifier and made observations over a 400 KHz band around the Hydrogen Line at 1420 MHz. • They observed Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for a total of two months, but only detected the, then top secret, U2 Spy plane!

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