Ancient super-Earth suggests longer timeline for alien life

A rocky, melted planet orbiting one of the galaxy’s oldest stars might be scientists’ best evidence, but that alien life may have arisen in the distant past.

The planet, called TOI-561b, is 280 light years from “super-Earth”. It is about 50% larger than our planet and three times its mass, but it is unlikely to harbor life. It orbits so close to its star that the researchers who discovered it calculated that its surface temperature is above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the top layer of rock into molten magma.

But this super-Earth is much older than scientists previously expected for rocky planets, suggesting that other stars may have ancient Earth-like worlds with temperatures more suited to life. These planets may have existed twice as long as Earth, giving them enough time to support complex life and even intelligent civilizations.

The star that TOI-561b orbits is in the galaxy’s “thick disk”, the outer region above and below the flat plane that contains most of the Milky Way’s material. The stars in the thick disk are around 10 billion years old, and researchers believe this planet is just as old.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

“TOI-561b is the first planet with a confirmed rock composition around such an ancient star, demonstrating that rocky planets have formed during most of the history of the universe”, Lauren Weiss, postdoctoral fellow at the ‘University of Hawaii and the principal investigator in this discovery, said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “I’m just wondering if any of them have someone we’d like to talk to.”

The discovery was published Monday in The Astronomical Journal.

Earth-like planets almost as old as our galaxy

NASA / ESA

Astronomers could tell how old TOI-561b is because the density of the planet is about the same as that of Earth, even though it has three times the mass. This means that it probably doesn’t contain a lot of heavy elements, like iron or magnesium.

It has taken billions of years for the galaxy to fill up with heavy elements, because they have to be forged deep in the stars. As the stars age, die and explode, these elements disperse and eventually merge into new planets. So, 10 billion years ago, heavy elements were scarce, and planets weren’t very dense. This appears to be the time when TOI-561b formed.

“Damn, if we’ve only been around 5 billion years, imagine what could have happened in a rocky world that’s been around 10 billion years,” Weiss said.

His team discovered the TOI-561b using the WM Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii. There are two other planets orbiting the star, but their large size and low mass indicates that they are gaseous, like Jupiter.

Alien hunting could include fossils

NASA / JPL-Caltech

This discovery adds to a growing body of research that suggests that life on other planets could have evolved, developed technological civilizations, and died out long before life arose on Earth.

This could open up an entirely new avenue in the search for extraterrestrial life. Instead of listening to messages from aliens looking for other intelligent life, scientists may have a better chance of scanning the skies for fossils.

“If you’re looking for evidence that things existed in the past in addition to the present, you’re more likely to find something,” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Insider’s Aylin Woodward.

Loeb’s new book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” argues that the first interstellar visitor to pass Earth – a disc-shaped object called ‘Oumuamua – was ancient alien technology.

European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser / Document via Reuters

NASA’s next rover on Mars, Perseverance, is set to search for its own remnants of past life. If its landing goes as planned on February 18, the robot explorer will scan an ancient lake bed for signs of long-extinct Martian microbes. He’s ready to take samples of interesting rocks and dirt and set them aside for a later mission to bring them back to Earth.

As with the rest of the galaxy, current efforts are mostly focused on finding rockier planets that might have habitable temperatures, and then examining their atmospheres for signs of life.

NASA / Chris Gunn

NASA’s $ 10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch into Earth orbit on Halloween. The project aims to study each phase in the history of the universe, helping to reveal how the first stars and galaxies were formed. By scanning other stars and planets with infrared light, JWST should be able to see the atmospheres of extraterrestrial planets.

Other telescopes designed to examine Earth-sized planets like TOI-561b have been proposed but not yet built. The observatory of habitable exoplanets (HabEx) would for the first time have a direct image of planets similar to Earth. Another telescope concept, called the Large UV / Optical / IR Surveyor (LUVOIR), would also look for signs of habitability, or life itself, on distant planets.