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Sep 10, 2021 · Sep 10, 2021. Article. Do aliens exist? Extraterrestrial life has never been discovered, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. At NASA, astrobiologists like Lindsay Hays are trying to answer one of the most profound questions ever: Is there life beyond Earth? Do Aliens Exist? We Asked a NASA Scientist. Watch on. Do aliens exist?
Although no extraterrestrial life has been found and life may still be just a rarity from Earth, there are scientific reasons to suspect that it can exist elsewhere, and technological advances that may detect it if it does. Many scientists are optimistic about the chances of finding alien life.
Sep 29, 2023 · 29 September 2023. By Pallab Ghosh,Science correspondent. ESA. Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons is the most likely place in our solar system to be home to alien life. Many astronomers are no...
Nov 2, 2021 · Its source was closer to Australia. That's why Green and NASA are proposing a scale to better contextualize new findings in research about extraterrestrial life and help explain those discoveries ...
- Joe Hernandez
- Overview
- Planets, Planets Everywhere
- Reading the Signatures of Life
- A Second Origin
With ever more intriguing worlds found in the sun’s neighborhood, the search for extraterrestrials is set to take some bold new steps.
Palo Alto, CaliforniaOur galaxy is positively stuffed with alien worlds.
That exoplanets swarm the Milky Way, and that a good fraction of them are small, rocky, and temperate like the planet we live on, means the search for life beyond Earth is moving past the question of whether these worlds are common and on to the more profound question of whether those faraway worlds also host life.
“We’re no longer wondering if rocky planets are in the habitable zones of stars,” the University of Arizona’s Olivier Guyon said during last week’s Breakthrough Discuss conference, hosted by the Breakthrough Initiatives. “As far as we can tell, they’re everywhere. We’re transitioning into life-finding. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Whether planets are a galactic feature or a bug has really only been resolved in the last five years or so, as instruments with increasingly sharper eyes have carved out the signatures of planets from faraway starlight and delivered those worlds to eager Earthlings.
Tantalizingly, some of those worlds circle the stars nearest the sun, and they are in orbits that make it likely that liquid water dampens their surfaces. Scientists are not even close to nailing down which characteristics tell us that, yes, a planet is indeed habitable, or to parsing all the ways in which life might write its signatures, whether biological or technological.
The sun’s neighborhood is filled with small, dim red stars called M dwarfs. Though they’re the most common type of star in the galaxy, these dwarfs weren’t always considered good places to search for habitable planets—that’s only become a trend over the last couple of years. Now, based on data from several surveys, we know that one out of every four M dwarfs has a planet that’s the same size and temperature as Earth, says Caltech’s Courtney Dressing.
Take the star just next door, a red dwarf 4.24 light-years away called Proxima Centauri. It has a planet.
Actually, there’s at least one planet around that small star. At the Breakthrough meeting, Guillem Anglada-Escude, of Queen Mary University of London, pointed to two other intriguing signals in his team’s data. Neither of the other two signals can be confirmed as the fingerprint of a planet right now, but the team hopes more observations will reveal an answer.
Slightly farther afield, another candidate world orbits a dim, cool star six light-years from the sun. Named after astronomer E.E. Barnard, this next-nearest star has been the hypothetical host of planets for decades, ever since Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp erroneously announced in the 1960s that at least one gas giant lived there.
If the freshly detected world is really there, it’s more massive than Earth and is likely too cool to be considered habitable. But planets don’t usually form in isolation, so it does offer hope for future finds around Barnard’s star.
“We will be hunting for warm planets in the summer, but there is not such a clear candidate for a warm planet yet,” Anglada-Escude said.
The best worlds to scrutinize for signs of life—for the foreseeable future, at least—will need to orbit close enough to Earth for telescopes to get a good look, and be positioned so that they cross their host star’s face from our perspective. That way, light from the star can filter through any potential atmosphere and allow us to read its contents.
That’s one of many tasks NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, among other projects, are gearing up to do over the next decade. If all goes to plan, TESS will find more planets worth staring at, and JWST will use its powerful eye to peer through any distant atmospheres, looking for molecules that might betray the presence of life.
At the Breakthrough meeting, Cornell University’s Lisa Kaltenegger and others proposed that something like a mix of methane and oxygen-containing gases such as ozone could herald the discovery of extraterrestrial life—if they were found wafting through the air curled around a rocky, temperate planet. But even that isn’t a slam-dunk. Proving life was truly responsible for those gases promises to be a controversial, Herculean task.
Plus, there are plenty of unfamiliar ways for life to find a foothold, using alien metabolisms that produce unexpected signatures. Kaltenegger and Cornell’s Jack O’Malley-James suggested last year that life-forms on Proxima’s planet, for example, could have evolved to use their star’s predominantly UV light by generating fluorescent proteins, and that telescopes on Earth could be tasked with looking for fluorescent biosignatures.
Recognizing life in all its possible biological forms isn’t just a question that’s plaguing exoplanet experts—it’s something scientists searching for life in the icy oceans of the outer solar system are also grappling with.
“We have one data point for life: That’s our own planet,” Kaltenegger says. “So for now, we’ll use what we know from the Earth. If we get a second data point, which I hope we do, I think all our priorities are going to change.”
Merely finding life, no matter how far-flung or bizarre, doesn’t necessarily tell us how it sprouted, and whether the process was any different from the origins of life on Earth. That is an even tougher and more nagging question, says NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay.
Proving a second origin—and therefore making a more profound commentary on the fundamental prevalence of life—can be done from afar, McKay said, although it’s just on the hairy edge of possibility.
Astronomers could look for the “handedness” of alien biomolecules and see if it matches what we have on Earth. Here, the molecules that build our proteins are asymmetric and assume what scientists refer to as a left-handed chirality—meaning they’re mirror images of hypothetical right-handed forms, and they twist light in a particular direction.
There’s no easy answer for why or when lefties ended up dominating Earth’s amino acids (this is a subject of great debate), but biochemists generally think single-handedness is crucial for efficient molecular engines.
Finding evidence for right-handed molecules in the gases of an exoplanet, or in the plumes of an icy moon in this solar system, would be strong (though not necessarily iron-clad) evidence for a second origin, McKay says.
The next big leap in exploring questions about alien worlds is to visit one up close, and that’s where the Breakthrough Starshot project comes into play. If the team succeeds, humanity will propel a nano-sized spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system in the next several decades and capture the first images of an exoplanet from within its own system.
Today we have confirmed about 4,000 exoplanets. The majority were discovered by the Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009. Kepler’s mission was to see how many planets it could find orbiting ...
Feb 1, 2023 · 19 min read. The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It. Scientists are abandoning conventional thinking to search for extraterrestrial creatures that bear little resemblance to...
