New Planet Discoveries Signal a Shift in the Hunt for Alien Life
New Planet Discoveries Signal a Shift in the Hunt for Alien Life
With ever more intriguing worlds found in the sun’s neighborhood, the search for extraterrestrials is set to take some bold new steps.
By Nadia Drake
PUBLISHED APRIL 27, 2017
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
Our 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.
More:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/new-planets-life-close-earth-space-science/
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