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NASA has announced a new project to explore extraterrestrial life among the thousands of exoplanets that had already been discovered in the past. The new project solicited the participation of experts from different scientific disciplines.
( NASA )
NASA is leading a new project looking for signs of extraterrestrial life among the 3,700 exoplanets discovered over the past 30 years.
The project is specifically aimed at identifying biosignatures that may have been created by alien life forms currently or left behind by extraterrestrials in the past. The biosignatures are elements, particles, molecules or phenomena that serve as proof that other beings are still hiding or living in one of these exoplanets.
The project, called Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science or NExSS, was formed three years ago with the ultimate goal of finding answers to the question of whether humans are lonely in the universe. NASA is building an international team of scientists composed of astrobiologists, planetary scientists, Earth scientists, heliophysicists, astrophysicists, chemists and biologists to work on the project.
The first results of the team's work were detailed in five separate articles published this month in the journal. astrobiology.
In the end, the newspapers all proposed ways to interpret the presence of the most promising signs of life so that humans could distinguish another living world that could have disguised itself as a sterile planet. They wanted to leave room for theorization and eventually come up with solid scientific evidence.
"Given the massive implications of detecting a foreign biosphere on an exoplanet, we will need all the tools in the toolbox to establish a sufficient level of confidence in our results," said Theresa Fisher, author and a degree in Geological Sciences from the School of Earth Exploration and Space at Arizona State University.
NExSS scientists to answer the question about whether we are alone
The first five articles essentially presented a framework in which scientists classified all the scientific instruments needed to detect biosignatures and a list of potential biosignatures that scientists could observe. Thanks to this, the scientists involved will then create a guide that will largely classify the common features of both "living worlds" and "non-living worlds".
Scientists aim to identify as many biosignatures as possible, especially those that are not on Earth. In this way, scientists hoped to avoid being deceived into thinking that a planet is uninhabitable simply because it has no biosignatures similar to what was found on Earth.
"We need to be open to the possibility that life can arise in many contexts in a galaxy with so many different worlds – perhaps with a purple life instead of the dominant green living forms on Earth, for example," says Mary. Parenteau. , co-author of one of the journals and astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
Biosignatures of exoplanets
One of the papers was written by a team of scientists from Arizona State University and the University of California at Riverside. An important overview of the article is for experts to observe the Earth's biosphere, both at present and during geological times. Edward Schwieterman, the lead author of the paper, said that the lack of oxygen in a planet, for example, is not a sufficient basis for classifying this planet as uninhabitable. He said that life could exist in the absence of oxygen gas because that was the condition when the early life began on Earth.
In a separate article from a team at Arizona State University, scientists argued that the search for biosignatures should be extended beyond those of known life. Instead of focusing on whether a planet is habitable or not, the paper argued that experts should focus on the detectability of life on the planet. The document says that extraterrestrial life may have needs that differ from what life on Earth requires.
Another article from a team at the University of Washington provided a framework for assessing the chemical composition of an exoplanet, its atmospheric conditions, the presence of oceans and continents, and its global climate. The team provided a systematic way to evaluate a candidate for biosignature "very likely" to welcome life as "very unlikely" to produce life.
Two other papers deal with future scientific technologies that can be used to accurately detect biosignatures, even from the most distant exoplanets.
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