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Extraterrestrial evidence: 10 incredible findings about aliens from 2020

Link: https://www.livescience.com/alien-discoveries-2020.html

Is E.T. phoning us from Proxima Centauri?

The answer to weird signals happening in the universe is never aliens, until maybe it is. Earlier this month, researchers announced that they had captured a very mysterious beam of energy in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum at 980 megahertz, coming from the closest star to our own. Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light-years away, hosts one gas giant and one rocky world 17% larger than Earth that happens to be in its star's habitable zone, meaning liquid water could exist there

Alien bacteria might live in the clouds of Venus

Astrobiologists were a-twitter with anticipation and skepticism in September when news broke of potential evidence of life in the upper clouds of Venus. The announcement pointed to the presence of phosphine, a rare and often poisonous gas that, on Earth at least, is almost always associated with living organisms. With its hellish surface temperature, outlandish pressure and sulfuric-acid clouds, Venus has long played second fiddle to the seemingly more potentially habitable Mars.

'Oumuamua could still be an alien artifact

Two years ago, scientists spotted a cigar-shaped object hurtling through the solar system. Dubbed 'Oumuamua, the entity is considered by most to be an interstellar comet flung out from around another star. But close observations showed that 'Oumuamua was accelerating, as if something were propelling it, and scientists still aren't sure why. Avi Loeb, a Harvard University astrophysicist has proposed that, instead of a comet, the interstellar visitor could have been an alien probe pushed by a lightsail — a wide, millimeter-thin piece of material that accelerates as it's pushed by solar radiation.

Earth bugs breathe hydrogen, maybe aliens do too

Most Earthlings require oxygen to survive. But oxygen isn't common in the cosmos, making up about 0.1% of the ordinary mass of the universe. There's far more hydrogen (92%) and helium (7%), and many planets, including gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, are made mostly from these light elements. In May, scientists took E. coli (a bacteria found in the guts of many animals, including humans) and ordinary yeast (a fungus used to bake bread and make beer) and tried to see if they could live in different environments. Such microbes are already known to survive without oxygen and, when placed in a flask filled with either pure hydrogen or pure helium, they managed to grow, albeit at slower rates than usual. The findings suggest that when searching for organisms elsewhere in the universe, we might want to consider places that don't look exactly like Earth.

Overachieving aliens likely annihilated themselves, study suggests

Link: https://nypost.com/2020/12/22/over-achieving-aliens-likely-annihilated-themselves-study/

Any aliens in our galaxy have already likely annihilated themselves — the victims of too much progress, a new scientific study says.

Researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology have surmised that since past studies show a civilization’s technological advances “will inevitably lead to complete destruction and biological degeneration,’’ any intelligent life previously in the Milky Way has already likely killed itself off.

“[I]f intelligent life is likely to destroy themselves, it is not surprising that there is little or no intelligent life elsewhere,” the researchers said in a paper posted online earlier this month.

The scientists also theorized that humans are late to the party because peak conditions for life to develop likely occurred about 8 billion years after the galaxy formed — and we emerged around 13.5 billion years after the Milky Way...