Tuesday, October 25, 2011


An artist's rendering illustrates an icy planet-forming disk around a young star called TW Hydrae, in the constellation Hydra
NASA / JPL / Caltech

If E.T. is out there, it may be a lot easier to find him than we thought — mostly because there are a lot more places for him to live. Scientists looking for life (or at least earthlike life) have always obeyed a simple rule: follow the water. Biology is a wet process, after all — and generally the wetter the better. Now, the Herschel Space Observatory has spotted an infant solar system 175 million light years from Earth that seems fairly awash in primordial water. The finding suggests many more such systems may be out there — and offers tantalizing clues about how our own biologically rich world began as well.

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