From the University of Toronto:
Search for life on exoplanets more difficult than thought
A new study from the University of Toronto Scarborough suggests the search for life on planets outside our solar system may be more difficult than previously thought.
The study, authored by a team of international researchers led by UTSC Assistant Professor Hanno Rein from the Department of Physical and Environmental Science, finds the method used to detect biosignatures on such planets, known as exoplanets, can produce a false positive result.
The presence of multiple chemicals such as methane and oxygen in an exoplanet’s atmosphere is considered an example of a biosignature, or evidence of past or present life. Rein’s team discovered that a lifeless planet with a lifeless moon can mimic the same results as a planet with a biosignature.
“You wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them because they are so far away that you would see both in one spectrum,” says Rein.
The resolution needed to properly identify a genuine biosignature from a false positive would be impossible to obtain even with telescopes available in the foreseeable future, says Rein.
“A telescope would need to be unrealistically large, something one hundred metres in size and it would have to be built in space,” he says. “This telescope does not exist, and there are no plans to build one any time soon.”
Current methods can estimate the size and temperature of an exoplanet planet in order to determine whether liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface, believed to be one of the criteria for a planet hosting the right conditions for life.
While many researchers use modeling to imagine the atmosphere of these planets, they still aren’t able to make conclusive observations, says Rein. “We can’t get an idea of what the atmosphere is actually like, not with the methods we have at our disposal.”
There are 1,774 confirmed exoplanets known to exist, but there could be more than 100 billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Despite the results, Rein is optimistic the search for life on planets outside our own is possible if done the right way.
“We should make sure we are looking at the right objects,” he says, adding that the search for life within our solar system should remain a priority. He points to the recent discovery of a liquid ocean on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s larger moons, as a prime example.
“As for exoplanets we want to broaden the search and study planets around stars that are cooler and fainter than our own Sun. One example is the recently discovered planet Kepler-186f, which is orbiting an M-dwarf star,” says Rein.
Rein says locating a planet in a habitable zone while being able to obtain a good resolution to model the atmosphere will help determine what’s on the planet.
“There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic that we will find hints of extraterrestrial life within the next few decades, just maybe not on an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/23/1401816111
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I think it’s simpler than that: ET is hiding in the deep ocean.
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ET is Greenpeace..
If we did not waste money on wars, and a bunch of other junk, we COULD build such a telescope.
What they really mean, is that finding ET is more difficult than THEY thought.
Well most of us never wasted a moment of sleep thinking about it.
Carl Sagan, went to his maker, having never found one binary digit of scientific information about ET life from anywhere outside a thin shell about +/- 25 km or so about MSL on planet earth.
It is second only to climate science, for providing a lifetime of taxpayer funded existence , with no expectation of finding out anything useful to life on earth.
So far as I know, life on earth began some 4.5 billion years ago, and I’ve seen no evidence of it ever beginning again anywhere in the universe, including on earth.
As I similarly proposed at the following WUWT post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/17/tilted-planets-may-actually-have-more-life-favorable-climate/
Proposal for a modified Drake Equation wherein the result is = 1.
N= R* fp ne fl fi fc fL : Drake Equation
My Equation: ,
1=R*Fa Fb Fc… Fn,
where Fa is a finely tuned attribute, Fb is yet another finely tuned attribute, Fc is yet another finely tuned attribute, and as many finely tuned attributes up to Fn such that the number of civilized planets is = 1.
The evidence is that life is unique to earth. Except for life sent to the moon and mars by we earthlings.
You’d think they would look for signs of life closer to home.
http://www.blogto.com/city/2007/01/scarberia_scarlem_scareborough/
It’s worse than we thought!
We can’t find a massive Boeing 777 on our own planet. Its just occurring to them that detecting trace amounts of alien farts on planets light years away is a pretty tough task?
– – – – – – – – –
They maintain the logic: liquid water therefore possible conditions for life because the Earth has liquid water and life. OK. That does limit the search parameters. That approach may be self-defeating due to limiting the search to liquid water environments.
Our knowledge is a single data point; Earth. We cannot yet preclude that elsewhere in the universe there may be forms of life that originated and have evolved in environments without water in any phase (vapor, liquid or solid). If life is common in the universe, we cannot yet know the distribution of life forms in different environments. We do not know if our Earth life forms evolving in a liquid water environment is either a unique, rare or common thing.
It is an immensely interesting area!!
John
John Wyndham, the author of “The Day of the Triffids”, “The Chrysalids”, and “Chocky”, also wrote a book “The Kraken Awakes”, about a war between humans and ETs who colonised the ocean depths.
At one point during the war the ETs used nuclear reactors to melt the polar icecaps, to increase the size of their territory, at the expense of humans.
A bit dated these days, but still quite readable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kraken_Wakes
I thought it was Global Warming that is hiding in the deep ocean….
“A telescope would need to be unrealistically large, something one hundred metres in size and it would have to be built in space,” he says. “This telescope does not exist, and there are no plans to build one any time soon.”
This doesn’t seem that extravagant – is there a misplaced decimal? I would think Multiple very large telescopes could work as well. And yeah, “The Kraken Wakes” was a fun story.
davidmhoffer says:
April 29, 2014 at 5:02 pm
We can’t find a massive Boeing 777 on our own planet. Its just occurring to them that detecting trace amounts of alien farts on planets light years away is a pretty tough task?
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LOL..you said that a lot nicer than I would have
The real head line should be Educate idiots have and empathy. To me a casual observer could have point out the problem rather quickly. Hydro carbons and water exist all over the place, their filter was on a very large one and that was only for life as we know it. There is always the possible of life outside our experience, whether it exist we do not know and and if we venture away from this planted it may be a very long time before we find that answer. The biggest if is is space travel possible, at present in is not, and all space travel we have it can only be local, as I get older and old it becoming clear and clear that may be the case..
Earth-like life might not actually require liquid water oceans to develop. The monomeric bases which constitute RNA, which can function both as an enzyme catalyzing polypeptide synthesis & as a store of information for replication, have been shown for example to form in the small pockets of liquid water in ice & furthermore to link together there.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v1/n6/full/ncomms1076.html
It’s even possible that this process could occur not just on planets or moons but other icy objects with various energy sources, like comets or asteroids, using the vast array of organic compounds, to include amino acids & polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (see sources in link below), known to exist in space, which raises the prospect of the panspermia hypothesis, as proposed by Hoyle & many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAH_world_hypothesis
I don’t see how going from “we have no idea” to “we still have no idea” is actually *worse*.
The one thing we do know is that very firm opinions on the subject have very little, if anything, to do with the amount of evidence.
Actually, that should not be a surprise.
Mark Luhman says:
April 29, 2014 at 5:32 pm
NASA & the European Space Agency had to chose between looking for life as we don’t know it on Saturn’s big moon Titan or life as we might know it on one of its smaller moons Enceladus, & probably wisely gave priority to the latter mission.
Increasing the effective aperture on radio telescopes has always been done using multiple antennas. At known distances and positions from one another so phase, frequency and angle pinpoints every signal or lack of. This way they can garner resolutions far beyond normal telescopes.
Now the next trick is to have multiple telescopes in space using light. The distance will have to be measured by laser but the aperture can be whatever you want.
We’ll discover evidence for extraterrestrial “intelligence” when we discover faster than light communications, well before we achieve faster than light transport.
I’m guessing the fist things we will hear on the sub-ether radio will be an advertisement for Zargot’s quality second hand spaceships and something talking about tentacle cream that will keep your suckers looking 1000 years young…
Why don’t they just send the Starship Enterprise?
Preliminary funding of $15 million for a mission to Jupiter’s life candidate ice moon Europa is in NASA’s 2015 budget, which is better than the agency’s current repurposing to promote the glories of Islamic science:
http://www.space.com/24926-nasa-europa-mission-2015-budget.html
Andyj says:
April 29, 2014 at 6:05 pm
As you may know, aperture synthesis imaging has been conducted on the ground in optical & infrared wavelengths, initially with aperture masking interferometry & later using arrays of separated telescopes. Optical/infrared interferometer arrays which have released aperture synthesis images include the Cambridge (UK) Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope, Mt. Wilson’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer, the Infrared Optical Telescope Array at the Whipple Observatory & the US Navy Precision Optical Interferometer. None in space yet, though.
There will never be any contact, so just stop worrying about it. We are, for all practical purposes alone, and it will always be so.
As Eric Idle sings in Monty Python’s Universe Song:
This is precisely why I do not believe evolution. The whole reason for looking for et is to prove evolution.
And before anyone jumps down my throat, please explain, without using faith based statements, or we think, believe, feel, the theory is, etc., explain how life started here to begin with, oh and without saying God started the whole lot rolling then stood back.
Oh and if anyone comes up with the “you must be a flat earther” your comment will be ignored.
Worse than who thought? An assistant professor of physical and Enviro sciences!!! Knowledge about environment on earth by his team is worse than we thought, perhaps. Why doesn’t he come right out and say we know there is methane on Titan that doesn’t seem to have life associated with it and we always thought this was a life signature? The disingenuousness of so many of the present generation of scientists is appalling and this is worse than anyone would have thought possible. We hear “Worse than we thought” virtually daily from the Air crowd. Don’t they know that eventually it will be interpreted as a deficiency in their thought processes.
Wasn’t it Fermi who asked, “Where are they?”
If they are out there, surely one or more of the ET civilizations would have sent somebody to say “hello”?