search for life on other planets tagged posts

In the search for life on other planets, the presence of oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere is one potential sign of biological activity that might be detected by future telescopes. A new study, however, describes several scenarios in which a lifeless rocky planet around a sun-like star could evolve to have oxygen in its atmosphere.

The new findings, published April 13 in AGU Advances, highlight the need for next-generation telescopes that are capable of characte...

Summary of gaseous, surface, and temporal biosignatures.

Some of the leading experts in the field, including a UC Riverside team of researchers, have written a major series of review papers on the past, present, and future of the search for life on other planets. Published in Astrobiology, the papers represent two years of work by the Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS), a NASA-coordinated research network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability, and by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.

Scientists have identified more than 3,500 exoplanets and many more will be discovered in the coming decades. Some of these are rocky, Earth-sized planets that are in the habitable zones of their stars, i.e. it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water – and possibly life – to exist...