Searching for Life on Earth and in Our Galaxy
Three stories take a look at the struggles of finding extraterrestrial life as well as life on Earth.
Everything we study about our planet, our solar system, and even exoplanets seems to come back to one big question: Are we alone? It’s a huge question, really. Perseverance is looking for evidence that Mars had life. Phosphine was in the news last year because it could have been a biological marker for Venus. Europa Clipper is in the works, with teams meeting this week to discuss the instruments and science objectives, one of which is to look for molecular signs of life in the geysers. And Kepler, wonderful Kepler, its mission was not to hunt for exoplanets. No, its mission was to find Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of their stars.
Today, we have found over 4000 exoplanets. We still haven’t found that Earth 2.0 everyone is looking for, though. Sure, there are planets about the size of Earth. There are planets in the habitable zone. But the stars are too active, the planets too big, or some combination of the two. Nothing seems to fit just right. And it could be that finding that Earth-like planet may be even harder than we originally thought.
In a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists examined how much energy planets receive from their host stars and if…
