1) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Proxima B (Message 1848552) Posted 13 Feb 2017 by adamtom Post: The new study took such characteristics into account, developing a new model of red dwarf "habitable zones" — the range of distances from a star at which liquid water should be stable on a world's surface — that considers more than just a parent star's heat. "By the classical definition, the habitable zone around red dwarfs must be 10 to 20 times closer in than Earth is to the sun," study lead author Vladimir Airapetian, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "Now we know these red dwarf stars generate a lot of X-ray and extreme ultraviolet emissions at the habitable zones of exoplanets through frequent flares and stellar storms." This is bad news from a habitability perspective. The team's modeling results suggest that such radiation can strip the electrons off molecules in orbiting planets' atmospheres. These electrons escape into space easily, and they drag the newly created, positively charged ions with them as they go. Light elements, such as hydrogen, are lost fairly easily via this process. And superflare radiation can kick the "atmospheric erosion" up a notch, driving off oxygen and nitrogen — key building blocks of life — as well, the new study found. "Considering oxygen escape alone, the model estimates a young red dwarf could render a close-in exoplanet uninhabitable within a few tens [of millions] to a hundred million years," NASA officials wrote in the same statement. "The loss of both atmospheric hydrogen and oxygen would reduce and eliminate the planet’s water supply before life would have a chance to develop." The team's work suggests that this fate has likely befallen the recentl

2) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Breakthrough listen (Message 1848550) Posted 13 Feb 2017 by adamtom Post: Berkeley SETI Research Center scientists and engineers are working with Breakthrough Listen to make data from Breakthrough available to the public, and you can choose a level of participation that matches your interest and abilities. Breakthrough data from the Green Bank Telescope are now flowing to SETI@home, and everyone can help out with the analysis! SETI@home is one of the world's largest citizen science projects, and enables users to donate a portion of their home computers' resources to aiding in our data analysis. We'd also like for you to get more involved, either by engaging with us on social media, reading more about the science and engineering aspects of our work, or even getting hands on with Breakthrough Listen public data. Data from the Automated Planet Finder and the Green Bank Telescope are flowing into the Breakthrough Listen public archive, but the data volumes are large, and the data are stored in raw formats that require specialized tools even to view, never mind to analyze. But if you are interested in learning more, please read through the following pages. The content will get more technical the further you go, but if you have the interest and time we hope you'll enjoy learning a little more about the tools we use to search for intelligent life beyond Earth.

3) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Kepler-452b (Message 1730055) Posted 29 Sep 2015 by adamtom Post: It is not known if Kepler-452b is a rocky planet or a small gas planet,[11] but based on its small radius, Kepler-452b has a reasonable chance of being rocky.[2] It is not clear if Kepler-452b offers habitable environments. It orbits a G2V-type star, like the Sun, with nearly the same temperature and mass and 20% more luminous.[7] However, the star is six billion years old, making it 1.5 billion years older than the Sun. At this point in its star's evolution, Kepler-452b is receiving 10% more energy from its parent star than Earth is currently receiving from the Sun.[5] If Kepler-452b is a rocky planet, it may be subject to a runaway greenhouse effect similar to that seen on Venus.

 
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