Swim under the Layer of ice of the Jupiter moon Europe? Are they racing through space in spaceships? “The question of whether it is extraterrestrial Organisms there is dividing the research community, ”said the US space agency NASA and the Michigan Technological University with who had organized the debate. It took place online because of the corona pandemic, and the scientists submitted their contributions in writing.
“Within the next 20 years we will be big technical ones Structures track down in space, ”believes the prominent US astronomer, for example Seth Shostak. The director of the observatory of the Vatican, Guy Consolmagno, however, does not expect starships, but the discovery of simple life forms. He suspects that we will soon find biological traces in the water that comes from Europe Inside shoots into space. “That would be a strong indication that it is below the Layer of ice gives life to the moon, ”wrote Consolmagno.
Exactly a hundred years ago
The online debate took place exactly 100 years after a sensational scientific duel. On April 26, 1920, the U.S. astronomers discussed Lifter Curtis and Harlow Shapley at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington asked whether the sun is in the middle of the Milky Way and whether there are other galaxies in the universe. Today it is known that the number of galaxies is in the billions – and that our star is in a branch of the Milky Way, far from the center.
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