New probes to study nearby worlds, advanced telescopes to contemplate distant planets, and expanding ideas about the signs of life fuel a renaissance in the search for life beyond Earth.
Why it’s important: Is it a millennial question: Is life as we know it on Earth unique, or is the universe full of life?
New probes to study nearby worlds, advanced telescopes to contemplate distant planets, and expanding ideas about the signs of life fuel a renaissance in the search for life beyond Earth.
Why it’s important: Is it a millennial question: Is life as we know it on Earth unique or is the universe full of life?
The big picture: The life search boom isn’t just about funding and better telescopes, says Andrew Siemion of Breakthrough Listen, a project that paints space for life’s radio signatures.
- “We also see a Copernican revolution taking place within astronomy, where the ubiquity of extrasolar planets is being viscerally felt and understood. This has really shaped the question of whether we are alone and the search for life.”
- More than 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered, almost all of them, in the last three decades, but as far as scientists know, life on Earth remains unique.
What is happening: Upcoming missions will look for signs of life and conditions for worlds near and far from Earth.
- NASA will have to send two new missions to Venus in the hope of better understanding how the geology of a planet is tied to its ability to harbor life and determine whether phosphine, a possible life signature, is present in the world. ‘cloudy atmosphere of Venus.
- Japan plans to send a robot to the moon of Mars Phobos in 2024 to collect and return samples from the satellite, which some scientists think may be the best place to look for signs of life on the red planet. Other missions are also underway to collect samples from Mars itself.
- “We’re no longer in reconnection mode, at least in the inner solar system,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary science professor at Caltech.
The moon of Jupiter Europe it will be studied whether there are signs of life in a NASA mission planned for the next decade. Researchers present a similar study on Saturn’s small, icy satellite, Enceladus, a potentially habitable port in our solar system.
- “While these worlds do not exist in the classical habitable zone, conditions could be favorable for life in the vast oceans beneath their ice shells,” says Lynnae Quick, a NASA planetary scientist who studies the oceanic worlds and is a member of the scientific team of the Europa Clipper mission.
Beyond the limits of our solar system, scientists continue to look for signs of life that are not molecules of microbes, but there are radio signals that indicate another technologically advanced life.
- But today’s sophisticated technology may not yet be sensitive enough to detect signals from other worlds, so new radio telescopes are being developed, such as the next-generation array and the Square Kilometer Array observatory, with collection areas. larger and therefore more sensitive. radio telescopes.
- “It will be the first time [we can be] truly sensitive to an Earth-like civilization in any instant observation, ”Siemion says.
What to see: As the modeling of planetary atmospheres improves and scientists ’understanding of the diversity of the worlds expands, they begin to look for even more fundamental signs of life.
- There appear to be patterns in the chemical reactions of living systems that differ from non-living systems, says Tessa Fisher, a graduate student at Arizona State University who studies these reactions.
- And more complex molecules tend to take more steps to create, she says. The molecules created in each reaction could be measured with an instrument in a space probe.
- This work “demonstrates a shift towards the search for a smoking gun for life tests (oxygen or amino acids) to think about life from the point of view of the system and look at how life interacts with its environment.”
Far away: “In 2051, I hope to do some astronomy from the Moon, ”says Siemion.
- There, astronomers do not have to fight the Earth’s atmosphere and the interference of radio signals. Siemion and some other researchers propose a “lunar astronomy village” of telescopes that share infrastructure.
- “It’s more of science fiction, but with the pace of things it may not be so far-fetched,” he says.