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So we’re looking for gases that are present in quantities that can’t really be explained any other way. We’re actually in a bit of a limbo right now, because there are gases produced in large quantities but they are created by geophysics and atmospheric chemical reactions as well there are gases produced in small quantities specific to life on Earth (but there isn’t enough to detect them from this far away). Because what we end up finding is pretty much any other gas, including oxygen at some level, though it’s produced by life, it usually has another source. Q : So it wouldn’t necessarily need to be oxygen though, right?Ī : Right, then the question is the list of gases, which raises a bit of a problem. That’s very important for exoplanets if there’s an alien civilization around a nearby star with the kind of space telescope we’re trying to build, they’ll see oxygen, they may not 100 per cent know that’s caused by life, but they’ll know that shouldn’t be there. If we didn’t have life on our planet… we would have virtually no oxygen.Įvery kid has learned in school that our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, 80 per cent, mostly oxygen, 20 per cent, with maybe a per cent of Argon. We have oxygen, but oxygen is a highly reactive gas. The reason we fixate on this is that we have that on our own planet Earth. Q : Once you find a small rocky planet with liquid water, how do we detect life from this far away and telescope images?Ī : Our search for signs of life, what we’re looking for are gases in the atmosphere that don’t belong. AP Photo/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David A. They actually need to be concentrated in little pools… a completely ocean-covered planet might not cut it. Some people think you need land and ocean to get life, that if you just have an ocean everything is too diluted, all the ingredients are too spread out. We’re confident we’ll find that: rocky planets with liquid water. We’re looking for a planet we call “potentially habitable,” if it might be the right temperature for liquid water, we call it “habitable” if it has liquid water. So, if we see water vapour on a small rocky planet, that should be indicative of a reservoir. Article content We’re confident we’ll find that: rocky planets with liquid water This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. We don’t hear about that because we’re not pumping water vapour into our atmosphere, but it’s so strong we can see it literally from far away. On Earth, it’s our biggest greenhouse gas. Water vapour is actually a very strong absorber (of energy from a star). But what we will be able to see (from telescope images) is vapour in the atmosphere. Now on a planet we can’t get a beautiful image like the Apollo images of Earth, we can’t see an ocean.
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Q : How will you know you’ve not only found a habitable planet but signs of life?Ī : What we call habitable now is quite simple: all life on earth needs water, so we call a planet habitable if it has liquid water. Now we’re just waiting til we have the next generation of telescopes (such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, both of which have a Canadian connection) so we can more easily access these smaller planets. I think it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. It’s amazing that as soon as astronomers had the tools to find planets in the habitable zone they found one and they they found more.