"Soot Planets" Might Be More Common Than "Water Worlds"

According to astronomers, water worlds, though admittedly not those containing Kevin Costner, are one of the most common types of planets in our solar system. This is partly due to low density estimates and the abundance of water ice past the “snow line” orbit of a star. But a new paper led by Jie Li and their colleagues at the University of Michigan, suggests there might be an alternative type of planet that fits the density data but is made up of a completely different type of material - soot.

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More Data and Machine Learning has Kicked SETI Into High Gear

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...

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