Exoplanets

Thanks to the good folk at NASA (once again!) we are now a little closer to finding signs of life on other planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets). Scientists working with NASA's SPITZER infrared telescope amazed even themselves when they were able to identify molecules in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star, 904 trillion miles (153 light years) away. The planet has the rather unromantic name of HD209458b, and is in orbit around a star in the constellation Pegasus. They also studied a planet named HD189733b, orbiting a star in the constellation Vulpecula, 370 trillion miles (62 light years) away, and were able to identify molecules in its atmosphere as well.

No, that's not a photo. Someday, we will be able to actually photograph exoplanets, but that day is still far away. In the meantime, we have this excellent artist's conception of an exoplanet, from the NASA public archives, showing the atmosphere now detectable with the SPITZER telescope. You may not be aware of the fact that astronomers have discovered over 200 exoplanets so far. That's right, 200. And that's just from studying stars a few hundred light years away in our immediate neighbourhood. The Hubble Space Telescope recently looked 26,000 light years away toward the centre of our galaxy, and in a tiny random piece of the sky found 16 exoplanets. When this number is extrapolated, it is calculated that there must be no less than 6 billion exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy.

And those are just the giant gas planets that are larger than Jupiter, because currently we can only detect planets of that size. But it follows from what we have learned about the formation of solar systems, that there should be at least as many smaller, rocky planets like our Earth. Do you think maybe one or two of those 6 billion Earth-like planets might be home to some kind of life?

Well, in 2008, which is not very far away, we may just find out, because NASA is launching another telescope into space called the Kepler Observatory, shown in the illustration below, which is specifically designed to detect Earth size exoplanets. Like the Spitzer telescope, it should be able to identify the spectral signatures of specific molecules on those exoplanets. What do you think the significance would be if it found something like chlorophyll, or signs of industrial pollution? We would know once and for all that we are not alone, and life on Earth would never be the same.

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