Russian Aboard International Space Station Claims to Have Found Alien Life

(ANTIMEDIA) — According to state-owned Russian news agency TASS, a Russian cosmonaut on board the International Space Station claims to have discovered extraterrestrial bacteria. Anton Shkaplerov reported the discovery after swabbing the exterior of the craft during a spacewalk, a sample-collecting practice known as an “extravehicular activity.” If the bacteria is confirmed to be not of this Earth, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

“Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs,” Shkaplerov reported. “So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull.”

The cosmonaut took the sample using a cotton ball while he was monitoring the Russian modules of the space station during the Test and Biorisk projects. He says the bacteria was collected either from an obscure section of the station or from an area where fuel discharge accumulates.

“And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module,” Shkaplerov told TASS. “That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger.”

NASA has not commented on the purported discovery yet, but it would fit into a commonly accepted theory that high-speed space dust can carry microbes from other star systems. Some astrobiologists contend that all life on Earth actually originated from elsewhere in the galaxy and traveled to our home planet through a process called panspermia.

Meanwhile, the search for extraterrestrial life continues to heat up as scientists plan expeditions to Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn that has a massive global ocean underneath its crust of ice. Recent discoveries suggest this ocean is hydrothermally heated and contains gases on which microbes could potentially feed, meaning the conditions for biological life are right.

The bacteria discovered on the International Space Station will need to undergo additional tests. Scientists must rule out terrestrial origins. According to the cosmonaut who discovered it, the sample had likely spent 3 years in the vacuum of space, undergoing drastic fluctuations in temperature from minus 150 to plus 150 degrees Celsius. We know that bacteria and life forms like tardigrades can live in extremely hostile conditions. This means the bacteria sample could simply be a microbe from Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is analyzing 19 other dust samples to test for the presence alien microorganisms. In an era in which the rhetoric over “fake news” and propaganda continues to escalate and the United States finds itself in an artificial intelligence arms race with both Russia and China, we can add a new space race to the geopolitical landscape: the race to discover extraterrestrial life.

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Scientists Look For Signs Of Alien Life On Newly Discovered Planet

A mere 11 light-years away from our Solar System, a newly discovered exoplanet is the second-closest we’ve ever found that’s temperate enough to potentially host and sustain life. The Earth-sized exoplanet was just discovered and scientists are already searching for signs of life.

Ross 128 b orbits the inactive red dwarf star, Ross 128, in the system’s “Goldilocks zone.” This zone is known as the area in perfect distance from a star to support life. The planet is also probably rocky, not gaseous; and it’s at a distance from its star that means the temperature could be hospitable to life as we know it.

It was found using the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in Chile – the most precise instrument of its kind. And it took researchers a long time to nail down. “We started to observe this star in July 2005,” astronomer Nicola Astudillo-Defru of Geneva Observatory told ScienceAlert. “Since 2013, our monitoring started to be more intense, and only after acquiring 157 observations was the signal of the planet strong enough to be detected.”

The researchers were able to discover the planet using the radial velocity method of planet detection. This method differs from the transit method we usually hear about but it shows this technique still has a whole lot of potential for finding new exoplanets.

Here’s what we know about Ross 128 b so far. It’s 1.35 times the mass of Earth. This means it’s most likely a rocky planet since – as far as we know at least, gas planets tend to be giants.

That’s the other point in favour of Ross 128 b being a rocky planet: it’s relatively close to its host star. In fact, it’s 20 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, and completes an entire orbit in 9.9 days.

Why isn’t it too hot for life? Ross 128 is a cool, faint red dwarf. It emits less radiation than our yellow Sun, so Ross 128 b receives only about 1.38 times more irradiation than Earth. Its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be between -60 and 20 degrees Celsius (-76 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit). –Science Alert

Ross 128 also has fewer flares than most red dwarfs, such as Proxima Centauri, which has its own exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b. Conditions on Ross 128 b are expected to be much more stable than those on Proxima Centauri b.

We started to observe this star in July 2005. Since 2013, our monitoring started to be more intense, and only after acquiring 157 observations was the signal of the planet strong enough to be detected.”

What we don’t know yet is whether Ross 128 b has an atmosphere – that is something that is best determined by the transit method. But the Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction and due to see first light in 2024, will be powerful enough to image the planet directly, and hopefully, detect the biomarkers that indicate life.

“We have some ideas about which biomarkers to search for. Of course, it is only based on what we know on Earth,” Astudillo-Defru explained.