Campaign to search for extraterrestrial life (Part 2)

Things have changed since Secretary Kirk and Spock conducted a search for life and new civilizations. Back in the 1960s, while the Enterprise crew was exploring a galaxy filled with strange life forms, real astronomers were stuck in a solar system with eight devastated neighbors. there is no signal of any planet .

Many more planets were quickly found, but all of them were very large, equivalent to the size of Jupiter. The problem with Jupiter and similar sized planets is that they don't have a solid surface. But by the 21st century, many new technology techniques have helped select some planets small enough to have ice or ice surfaces. They are called super-Earths, their size folding the earth about 2 to 10 times.

Some planets are found based on the method of star wobbling while other planets appear when they pass through their star's surface. The phase passes through the surface like that creating a small celestial phenomenon that dims the star even if only a few parts of 1%. This is the method that the Kepker telescope applies to search for the same planet as the earth within the next year, although an earth-like planet can dim stars to less than 1/100 of the first%. However, this idea was opposed by NASA every year until scientists finally proved it through laboratory tests that the idea was in principle possible.

Kepler will observe only one spot in the sky near the constellation Cygnus where it can continue to control about 100,000 stars.

Even if everything is possible, Kepker satellite can only detect 1 out of 100 Earth-sized planets because these small natural events can only be observed if the fund the direction of a planet toward us. A planet like the earth has a phase that passes through the sun once a year, astronomers will have to wait to observe a few passing phases like that before they can confirm the actual object there. .

After 3 years, astronomers hope to conduct a space investigation - including Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

SETI campaign seeks life in the universe.(Photo: sabiduria)

Optimism is redundant

But does life exist in those planets?

Astronomers at the Baltimore conference are very optimistic. Life is more difficult than anyone thinks. The chemical traces of life in the past show that it appeared at least 3.5 billion years ago in the period of 4.6 billion years of Earth's existence.

Life may go further. 'This is a key fact,' McKay said. As soon as certain planets are available, it will be dominated by microorganisms.

An essential feature that everyone agrees with is liquid water. There is a lot of water on it, but for water to condense or melt into liquid water, the planet is forced to orbit its star at a suitable distance.

A few years ago, James Kasting of the University of Pennsylvania helped calculate what astronomers call 'survival zones' around stars. It is a distance that makes the planet's conditions cooler than Venus, or at least as warm as Mars. A small number of exoplanets are within the surviving region, including a recently published planet located 12 light-years away. Kepler may find more. But basically scientists are pursuing a much bigger goal: that is truly extraterrestrial life.

During the conference, astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute asked scientists to imagine the way we will apply to detect life on Earth if our twins are spinning. around a star lies only a few light years away. She said: 'We will be able to observe this tiny light, but there is a lot of information we actually get from it.'

Kasting at the University of Pennsylvania says: The key lies in the atmosphere. Our planet's atmosphere is full of oxygen and methane . These two substances can not be explained easily by any non-living chemical process . If we can discover it, we will get an answer.

Hubble's devices analyzed the atmosphere of a few giant planets as they passed in front of their stars. After being repaired this month, scientists plan to use Hubble to learn more.

We need more sophisticated telescopes, or even a telescope team, to analyze the atmospheres of planets the size of the earth.

The gases will not provide us with the understanding of the type of life that exists on the planet, or whether it has the form of a living creature with intelligence. There will exist mostly weeds, ponders, or viscous mold or something that we can't even imagine because we have never seen it.

Even so, we will have to go a long way to explain life on planets, what they do there, and how they can adapt in the vast universe that holds up to 100,000,000. 000,000,000 stars.

Campaign to search for extraterrestrial life (Part 1)