Commission 51: Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Microlensing and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets discovered via microlensing likely to be similar to those we experience on Earth? In this paper I link the microlensing observations to the well-known “Goldilo...

Extremophiles and the search for extraterrestrial life.

Extremophiles thrive in ice, boiling water, acid, the water core of nuclear reactors, salt crystals, and toxic waste and in a range of other extreme habitats that were previously thought to be inhospitable for life. Extremophiles include representatives of all three domains (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya); however, the majority are microorganisms, and a high proportion of these are Archaea. Kn...

Advancing the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Concepts for Detection of Extraterrestrial Life

Search for extraterrestrial point sources of neutrinos with AMANDA-II.

We present the results of a search for point sources of high-energy neutrinos in the northern hemisphere using AMANDA-II data collected in the year 2000. Included are flux limits on several active-galactic-nuclei blazars, microquasars, magnetars, and other candidate neutrino sources. A search for excesses above a random background of cosmic-ray-induced atmospheric neutrinos and misreconstructed...