CfA Press Room. Even dying stars could host planets with life - and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade.
This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf's planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. "In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs," said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation.
When a star like the Sun dies, it puffs off its outer layers, leaving behind a hot core called a white dwarf. A typical white dwarf is about the size of Earth. The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics. By Natalie Wolchover | March 28, 2016 05:01pm ET Credit: Image via Shutterstock In 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin is said to have pronounced: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.
All that remains is more and more precise measurement. " Within three decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity had revolutionized the field. Mysterious Particle Found After Decades of Searching. An elusive particle that is its own antiparticle may have been found, and, if confirmed, would be the first time a phenomenon predicted decades ago has been seen in a real system.
Some researchers suggest that in the future, this mysterious particle called a Majorana fermion could be useful in carrying bits of information in quantum computers. In a paper published in the journal Science Thursday, Vincent Mourikand Leo P. Kouwenhoven said they were able to make the Majorana fermions appear by exposing a small circuit to a magnetic field. Until now, the only suggestion of the particle's existence was a theory posed by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937, who predicted the Majorana fermion. A Multiverse of Exploration: Magic and Neuroscience. Snowflake Gallery: No Two Alike, of Course.