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Reposted by Carl Sagan Institute

Dr. Jake Turner 📡🧲🪐 @astrojaket.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Tonight, Diana (my PhD student) & I are observing on the Allen Telescope Array! 🔭 We are searching for signs of technology (technosignatures) from a transiting Earth-like planet in the habitable zone 👽📡 Even cooler, the exoplanet has seen Earth transit in the past 👀 @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social

The radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Dr. Jake Turner (@astrojaket.bsky.social ), CSI fellow, is involved with many future proposed Lunar radio telescopes, which will study exoplanets in the radio 📡 Radio observations are one of the main ways to study a planet's magnetic field, which may impact its habitability 🌍 🧲 Learn more 👇

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

"That's home. That's us." Carl Sagan As we gaze at the beauty of our own Earth, we can't help but wonder if life exists out there in the cosmos.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

For this reason, Bohl et al. list different types of habitable zone planets that astronomers should prioritize for future observations. This includes planets near the edges of the habitable zone (to help us refine our models), planets that are easiest to observe, and more!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

"Earth-like" is still an educated guess—it's hard to predict if these very different planets around very different stars are truly habitable. We'll need to take closer looks and confirm which planets have atmospheres and liquid water.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

New places to search for life in a CSI paper today! Most of the 6000 discovered exoplanets are deadly. Bohl et al. identify 45 of them as potentially Earth-like worlds. More at Cornell A&S: news.cornell.edu/stories/2026... Explanation, interactive images: www.gillislowry.com/rocky-hz-cat... 🔭

An artist’s impression of a planetary system around a slightly hotter star than our Sun. In prior research, Carl Sagan Institute scientists have theorized that organisms could evolve biofluorescence to protect themselves from a more intense star.

An artist's impression of a theoretical planet orbiting a redder star, which could cause microbes and plants on the planet's surface to reflect very different colors from Earth’s green forests.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Continued congratulations to the Alpha CubeSat team of students led by CSI fellow Dr. Josh Umansky-Castro!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

If you’re wondering why the images from Alpha are so grainy: Alpha’s optical deployment sensor is positioned at the bottom of its light sail compartment, and was only included to verify that the light sail had fully left the compartment and deployed. These clear views certainly prove that!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

From low Earth orbit, our planet still looms large below the little CubeSat, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Alpha is the "pale purple dot" here. See below for its size compared to the International Space Station, where it first deployed into space (party hat added for 1000 orbits)!

Four CubeSats (bottom left is Alpha!) deploying from the International Space Station.

Image credit: Voyager Technologies

Alpha deploying from the International Space Station, with a party hat added to celebrate its recent milestone of 1000 orbits around Earth!

Image credits: Voyager Technologies, Gillis Lowry

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Happy Pale Blue Dot Day and Valentine’s Day! 💙 We’re sending our love to Alpha CubeSat for completing 1000 orbits and beaming down its own pale blue images of Earth! 🔭

A tiny image of the Pacific Ocean by Alpha CubeSat!

A tiny image of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua?) by Alpha CubeSat!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

A new research paper including CSI fellow Jake Turner investigates magnetic interactions between stars and their planets—using distant auroras to detect and survey other worlds! 🔭 Read more: as.cornell.edu/news/novel-w... Image credit: Danielle Futselaar/Artsource.nl

Detecting exoplanets through radio bursts: planet-star interactions unveiled in new technique!

(An attempt at a retro vibe on top of cool artwork of a star's magnetic field arcing through its planet).

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Image 2 artist impression: Pablo Carlos Budassi (Celestialobjects) Jupiter image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstaedt / Sean Doran

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Such tiny creatures wouldn’t be proof of the sinkers, hunters, and floaters ecosystem that Sagan & Salpeter imagined, but who knows how many different creatures may float in alien skies? ☁️ ☁️ ☁️ Read more about Dr. Lígia Fonseca Coelho’s paper here: news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

news.cornell.edu

How to spot life in the clouds on other worlds | Cornell Chronicle

Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers searching for signs of life beyond our planet, Co...

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

The team found that a very high amount of floating microbes would significantly alter the light we’d observe, making the microbes possible to detect with upcoming space telescopes.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

CSI fellow Lígia Fonseca Coelho and her team measured the reflected light from Earth’s rare cloudy microbes, which often involve colorful pigments to help protect themselves from extreme temperatures and the Sun’s ultraviolet light.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

When Sagan & Salpeter imagined an ecosystem in Jupiter’s clouds, little was known about the microbes afloat in our own. Clouds are normally a hindrance in the search for life—they block views of the surface. But if organisms exist in clouds, might signs of life on overcast planets be detectable?

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

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Reposted by Carl Sagan Institute

Cornell Astronomical Society @ Fuertes Observatory @cornellastrosociety.org · 13/12/2025

Snowman at the Fuertes Observatory. ☃️

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Alpha’s mission sends the first holographic images to space, tests tiny ChipSat technology, demonstrates one of the smallest—and first free-flying—light sail designs, and proves that low-cost light sailing is a possible path for a variety of future missions. Ad astra, Alpha Cubesat ✨

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Regardless of its short lifespan, Alpha CubeSat has demonstrated the tenacity of hundreds of undergraduate students, equipped with a toolkit of nothing more than hobbyist electronics and their drive to help build the future of spaceflight.

Alpha CubeSat team members (including CSI fellow Dr. Josh Umansky-Castro on the left) constructing the spacecraft!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Drag is expected to pull the light sail out of orbit quicker than the CubeSat, so this may explain the silence. The sail was only projected to live for a few days, and the ChipSats are much smaller/harder to pick up than the CubeSat—so it's an incredible feat that we heard from them at all!

The final ChipSat design, four of which are currently affixed to the light sail in space!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

The CubeSat is currently alive and transmitting. You can see the data update every few hours here: alphacubesat.cornell.edu/dashboard.html. There's also a link to the light sail's ChipSat signals (although he team hasn't heard from the light sail's ChipSats recently).

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Just as suddenly as it fell silent, the spacecraft spoke again! Alpha heard the command and deployed the light sail successfully, and the tiny radio transmitters on the light sail (contained in four credit card-sized computers called “ChipSats”) began to send their own separate signals down, too.

The first signal from the ChipSats on Alpha CubeSat's light sail!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Alpha was silent for over 24 hours. After some movie-worthy moments of suspense, the team decided to send the “light sail deploy” command, hoping the spacecraft could still hear them.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

This video from the International Space Station on December 2nd shows four CubeSats (small cube-shaped spacecraft), one of which is Alpha, holding its light sail inside. Tumbling through space at thousands of miles per hour, Alpha sent radio signals soon after launch… then fell silent.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

CONGRATULATIONS to CSI fellow Dr. Josh Umansky-Castro and the whole Alpha CubeSat team: they've successfully deployed the first-ever light sail to “free fly” in space (disconnect from its spacecraft)! Read the story of its first few days in space below! 🔭

Artistic rendition of Alpha CubeSat deploying its light sail!

The light sail's estimated location above the coast of Africa on December 4th, 2025!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Happy 91st birthday, Carl Sagan. 🌌🎂 Stay tuned for posts this week that honor both his research legacy and his quest to make a more scientifically literate world…

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

If alien life fluoresces at the same wavelengths we’re familiar with—and if clouds don’t block too much of our view—then with upcoming telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, it may be challenging, but possible, to find glow-in-the-dark signs of life on small, rocky exoplanets!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

In a follow-up paper, the authors also found that biofluorescence could be useful around cooler red dwarf stars that have ultraviolet “flares"—high-energy bursts that life would need to protect itself from. Paper 1: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl... Follow-up: academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

Alien life may also need protection around cooler stars, whose ultraviolet flares can sometimes strike planets. Life around many types of stars could glow in the dark... if it exists for our telescopes to find.

(Artwork of an astronaut peering down at a glowing planet beneath a red star).

Illustration by Wendy Kenigsberg/Matt Fondeur/Cornell University

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

O’Malley-James & Kaltenegger found that if a planet around a bluer F-type star was covered in 70% ocean and 30% lifeforms such as strongly biofluorescent coral on Earth, then we could receive roughly 10% more light at the wavelengths that these organisms emit (see table below for more scenarios)

Pictured at the top is a table with differing values for the increased life we'd receive, depending on how much of the planet these lifeforms cover.

If alien life fluoresces at the same wavelengths we're familiar with—and if it covers enough of the planet—then by observing in these wavelengths, it may be possible to see glow-in-the-dark life.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

On alien planets orbiting bluer stars, where more “sunscreen” is needed, biofluorescence might make up a larger fraction of the light we’d receive in our telescopes. CSI researchers O’Malley-James & Kaltenegger examined biofluorescent life on Earth to determine what glowing colors of light we’d see.

Around stars with higher rates of dangerous ultraviolet light, alien life might fluoresce to protect itself, perhaps even more strongly than our best examples on Earth (similar to the ones pictured here—certain coral species).

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

You may be wondering—how bright is this “biofluorescence” anyway? Earth is covered in plants, and many of them emit a small amount of fluorescent light. However, this is just a fraction of a percent of all the green light we see reflected. (More info in Sagan’s Galileo study: tinyurl.com/yc2xtr43)

Many plants on Earth glow via biofluorescence, as mapped here—absorbing high-energy light, then "glowing" at a lower energy. However, planets reflect green light much more than they glow from biofluorescence. (The map shows high biofluorescence in forested regions on Earth).

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

The Sun’s ultraviolet light can damage our skin over time, leading to harmful mutations. On planets around slightly hotter “F-type” stars, which emit more blue and ultraviolet light than the Sun, it’s even more crucial to protect yourself. Alien life might use biofluorescence as natural “sunscreen!”

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

“Biofluorescence” works the same way as glow-in-the-dark stickers or shirts: some organisms on Earth have pigments that absorb high-energy (mostly ultraviolet) light, then slowly re-emit less energetic light, causing a long-lasting glow.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Happy Halloween! ✨ 👻 🎃 Jack-o’-lanterns aren’t the only signs of life that glow in the dark. Some organisms on Earth do, too. Would a distant planet full of glow-in-the-dark aliens be detectable to our telescopes? 🔭

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Someday soon, we may be able to say that out of 70 habitable zone planets, out of 6000 found, out of hundreds of billions that surely exist in the Milky Way… there is one more corner of the universe that knows itself.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Recent papers from Carl Sagan Institute researchers and exoplanet scientists worldwide (such as studies of TRAPPIST-1 e!) have brought us one step closer to detecting an atmosphere around an Earth-like, potentially habitable world.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

The star will have to treat its planet kindly, lest it strip away the planet’s atmosphere, or heat the planet so intensely it becomes a “lava world.” Even if the planet avoids these extremes and organisms manage to thrive, the world those organisms call home may look quite different from ours.

Around 70 exoplanets with rocky surfaces in the habitable zone (with artist's depiction of TRAPPIST-1 planets, four of which orbit within the broadest zone that may allow for liquid water on their surface)

*** Stats from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and from under-review habitable zone paper from CSI researchers.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Some of these planets—the more sedate, less extreme ones—have a chance at hosting life. They’ll need to be not too far, not too close, but just the right distance from their host star: in the “Goldilocks” or “habitable” zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.

87 exoplanets discovered through direct imaging (with real image of b Centauri b, which has 10x the mass of Jupiter but appears small with current imaging technology)

*** Stats from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

There is a planet that takes 49 minutes to orbit its pulsar, in a pirouette too tight to ever allow for life; there are red-hot planets where gems may fall from clouds of metal and deep blue dots where glass may rain sideways.

1171 exoplanets with masses likely larger than Jupiter (with artist's depiction of Kepler-7 b, a hot Jupiter—named for size rather than visual similarity, as it is far too hot to have many bands of clouds)

*** Stats from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

There are exoplanets that see two Suns in their skies, even three Suns; there are “rogue planets,” likely ejected from the disks of young stars, that shoot through an endless night; there is a planet that takes one million years to orbit its star;

552 exoplanets with more than one sun in their skies (with artist's impression of Proxima Centauri b, closest planet to Earth, and in a triple-star system).

*** Stats from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Note: 552 exoplanets are in multiple-star systems—though some likely orbit very far from their stars, so the “suns” in their skies wouldn’t be very large!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

6000 exoplanets. 🔭 We’ve found worlds orbiting all sorts of stars, from tiny, slow-burning reds to fast-living blue-whites to middle-of-the-road, prime-of-their-life yellows like our own...

600 exoplanets. The strange worlds we've found so far—and what we still don't know.

***Artist's depiction by Pablo Carlo Budassi (Celestialobjects)

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Just over five hours until Cornell's Alpha CubeSat launches on its way to the International Space Station! Learn more about the satellite, its lightsail, and its holograms at alphacubesat.cornell.edu, and tune into the livestream of the rocket launch there!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

Congratulations to project lead/CSI engineer Josh Umanksy-Castro, project advisor/CSI fellow Mason Peck, and to all the Cornell students who poured their heart into this mission!

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

The NG-23 ISS commercial resupply mission launch is scheduled for Sunday 9/14 at 6:11pm EST with a backup opportunity on Monday 9/15 at 5:49pm. Alpha will ride to the International Space Station, then patiently wait for its turn to launch off the station and into space in mid-November.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

A large group of Cornell students, alumni, family and friends are traveling to Cape Canaveral this weekend to view the launch! We invite you to join us by tuning into the livestream, linked at alphacubesat.cornell.edu.

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

After 9 years and over 100 students, Cornell's Alpha CubeSat mission is launching to space TOMORROW! This small cube-shaped satellite will test the deployment of the first-ever free-flying light sail in low Earth orbit, a stepping stone towards laser sailing to the stars. 🔭 alphacubesat.cornell.edu

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

For now, CSI researchers will construct better and better models for TRAPPIST-1 e's busy host star, until the day we can fully disentangle little planets from jumpy starlight! Read more: carlsaganinstitute.cornell.edu/news/there-w... (Papers also linked in article)!

From NASA / Joseph Olmsted: "The Earth-size exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 e, depicted at the lower right, is silhouetted as it passes in front of its flaring host star in this artist’s concept of the TRAPPIST-1 system."

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Carl Sagan Institute @carlsaganinstitute.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

But even noisy data lets us rule out a few possibilities—models that would cause much larger dips than the ones in the graph. TRAPPIST-1 e is unlikely to have a huge hydrogen atmosphere, nor a huge carbon dioxide atmosphere like Venus, which traps enough heat to melt lead.

From the second of the two research papers (linked at end of thread): nitrogen-rich (like Earth) atmospheric models, and possible signatures of gases like CH4 (methane).

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