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California astronomers in the United States have discovered that toxic fumes and gases make some planets uninhabitable to advanced forms of extraterrestrial life. The shocking revelation, presented this week by the University of California at Riverside, means that most planets are unfit for advanced life. While microbes and simple bacteria can thrive in inhospitable environments, complex life requires very specific conditions. The good news, however, is that extraterrestrial discovery dramatically reduces the number of potential planets where extraterrestrial life might exist.
Timothy Lyons, a co-author of the study, said, "This is the first time that the physiological limits of life on Earth have been used to predict the distribution of complex life elsewhere in the world. universe".
Professor Lyons is an experienced biogeochemist from UC Riverside and director of the Alternative Land Astrobiology Center, which sponsored the study.
The researcher used powerful computer models to study the atmospheric conditions of distant planets outside our solar system.
The results were published this week in an article in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Life on Earth is complex because our planet is located in a so-called "habitable" zone where conditions are conducive to the presence of liquid water.
The habitable zone describes a region of the solar system that is neither too close nor too far from its host star.
But not all the planets in this area need to be habitable and their climate and atmosphere play a crucial role in their habitability.
Professor Lyons said, "Imagine a 'living zone for complex life' defined as a safe zone where it would be plausible to preserve rich ecosystems as we find it today on Earth.
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"Our results indicate that complex ecosystems like ours can not exist in most areas of the livelihood zone as traditionally defined."
The researcher and his team studied distant exoplanets to detect carbon dioxide in their atmosphere.
The powerful greenhouse gas on Earth is one of the biggest contributors to global warming and the climate.
However, on planets too far from their stars, high levels of carbon dioxide could be critical in keeping temperatures above zero.
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NASA postdoctoral fellow Edward Schwieterman, who is responsible for the study of alien life, said: "To conserve liquid water at the edge of the conventional habitable zone, a planet would need tens of thousands of times more carbon dioxide than the Earth.
"This far exceeds the known levels of toxicity to human and animal life on Earth."
As a result of these findings, the toxicity of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reduces the habitable safety zone to less than one-third of this area.
And to complicate matters further, some stars like Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1, all close, do not have habitable areas for the life of the extraterrestrials.
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According to the NASA Space Agency, on June 12 this year, there were 3,972 exoplanets confirmed in remote systems and 3,640 exoplanets on waiting lists.
But solar systems and their planets are simply too far away to be reached by a human or distant spacecraft, which means that astronomers can only study the planets by observing their atmospheres.
Christopher Reinhard, a UC Riverside graduate and an adjunct professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said, "Our discoveries are a way of deciding which of these myriad planets we should observe in more detail.
"We could identify otherwise habitable planets with levels of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide that are probably too high to support a complex life."
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