{"id":86,"date":"2003-10-14T23:24:07","date_gmt":"2003-10-14T23:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=86"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:07","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:07","slug":"looking-for-life-in-all-the-right-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"looking for life in all the right places"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Now if I were an alien, where would I be?  According to astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull of the University of Arizona  in Tucson, the best bet would be 37 Gem, the 37th brightest star in the  constellation of Gemini, some 42 light years away. Turnbull is choosing  targets for Terrestrial Planet Finder, NASA&#8217;s deep space telescope  project, which will search for earthlike worlds outside our solar system  and is scheduled to launch in the next decade. Turnbull has narrowed  down the 5,000 stars or so that lie within 100 light years of Earth to a  short list of 30 that could hold worlds capable of supporting life. One  of the things she looked at was the amount of heavy metals present  (more metals means more chance of rocky planets) and she eliminated  stars that were too young, telling <em>New Scientist:<\/em> &#8220;On Earth, it was two  billion years before enough oxygen built up to support complex life, so  we won&#8217;t look at stars that are less than a few billion years old.&#8221; The  star 37 Gem is at the top of her list because it is most like our solar  system: &#8220;The closer we look, the more we realize how [most] other stars  are different from the sun.&#8221; <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 10\/14\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now if I were an alien, where would I be? According to astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the best bet would be 37 Gem, the 37th brightest star in the constellation of Gemini, some 42 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=86\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}