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Due to the limitations presented by our culture’s fledgling space travel technology, simply going to a planet orbiting another star isn’t a practical way of determining whether or not there’s any life there. Instead, researchers are using indirect methods of looking for extra-solar life, such as the conditions presented by the planet’s host star in relation to it’s orbit, the presence of an atmosphere, temperature, and so on. Now, a research team has devised a list of signature gases that astronomers can look for, that might be produced when a potential extraterrestrial organism metabolizes.
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While many connections between the pyramids of Egypt and the stars have been uncovered over the years, a new connection between the famous megaliths and the heavens has been made, resulting in the discovery of a previously-undiscovered chamber in the monument known as the Bent Pyramid, using cosmic rays as a form of deep-penetrating x-ray machine.
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A team of astronomers have discovered a system of three Earth-like exoplanets orbiting a small star that is only 40 light-years away from Earth, that are considered good candidates for supporting life.

The star in question, an ultracool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is only a bit bigger than Jupiter, and only emits approximately one two-hundredths of the output of our Sun, making it too faint to see with the naked eye. The planets in question, however, orbit very close to the star, allowing them to gather enough light from the star to keep warm. Because of their extremely close orbits, the planets orbit TRAPPIST-1 extremely quickly: the innermost planet takes 1.5 Earth days for a single revolution, and the second planet’s year is only 2.4 days.
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Sometimes, if you’re not getting an answer to a question that you’re asking, perhaps it can help to change the question itself? This turns out to be a new approach to the Drake equation being made by two astronomers at the University of Rochester and University of Washington, to address a shortcoming in astronomy’s famous equation that has made it impossible to draw any firm conclusions from it.
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