Researchers do not know if new worlds could support life – Axios

• These exoplanets – worlds outside our solar system – usually meet as they pass their star, allowing spacecraft such as NASA's TESS to detect tiny hollows in the light that occur during these transits. .
• Other telescopes have detected exoplanets by measuring the small oscillations of a star created by the gravity of the planet.
• Most of the exoplanets we have identified are more massive than the Earth and many are not stars in orbit like our sun.
• This leaves about 20 planets up here considered to be sufficiently small and at the right distance from their stars to be potentially habitable.

Between the lines: Using current methods, scientists can track the orbit of a planet and even get a decent measure of its mass, but beyond that, it's hard to know exactly what's happening on a small planet like ours.

• It is not enough to know if an exoplanet is in the habitable zone of its host star – the orbit where the liquid water could, in theory, extend to the surface.
• Scientists still need information on the composition, atmosphere and geology of a planet to be able to informally guess habitability.
• Even the core of an exoplanet would affect its liveability in that a liquid iron core like that of the Earth could help produce magnetic fields that would protect the surface of a planet's planet. incoming radiation.

Some of the most compelling evidence that a planet resembling the Earth may appear if scientists can detect atmospheric water vapor.

• However, the most powerful telescopes of today are not sensitive enough to analyze the composition of the atmosphere of a relatively small exoplanet.
• "I am absolutely convinced that there is life elsewhere, I simply can not point to the planet and tell you which planet it is," says the scientist of the exoplanet from NASA, Steve Howell.

And after? Scientists need new tools to know if they have found a world really similar to ours.

• NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled for launch in 2021, may be able to explore the atmospheres of small planets, even though it is probably best suited to dissect the atmospheres of larger, gaseous planets. .

It will probably be necessary to wait for the generation of telescopes after JWST to allow scientists to find a truly habitable exoplanet.

• Large UV / Optical / IR Surveyor is a NASA concept for a space observatory able to directly represent the atmosphere of a small planet for the first time.

While the public and other researchers might be eager to find another Earth, exoplanet scientists are on the long run.

• "Everyone wants to meet the little green humanoids," Sea Sea Sara Seager, a scientist at MIT, told Sea Sea. "We do not do it, but we will find enough to believe and to continue the research, it will be like in a hundred years, and we are only in 20 or 25 years."