Jakarta –
New NASA-funded research suggests that next-generation telescopes may be able to detect emissions on very distant planets to detect presence alien.
The galaxy is home to many potentially habitable exoplanets. But in order to determine if anything is really alive in this world, scientists hope to see some signs of life in the form of biological signs or technological signs. New research from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, United States mentions a search for the resulting pollution alien be one of these indicators.
“Observing NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) on a habitable planet has the potential to indicate the existence of industrial civilization. On Earth, most of the nitrogen dioxide is emitted from human activities, combustion processes such as vehicle emissions and fossil fuel power plants,” said Ravi Kopparapu of Goddard. from CNet.
Kopparapu is the lead author of a study investigating the idea of NO2 as a potential technological sign on planets outside our solar system. While other scientists consider chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) a sign of possible industrial activity beyond Earth.
CFCs were once used on Earth as refrigerants, but have been eliminated due to their bad effects on the ozone layer. Study co-author Jacob Haqq-Misra from the Blue Marble Institute of Science in Seattle noted that CFCs could also be used to shape and warm the atmospheres of planets like Mars to make them more habitable.
“As far as we know, CFCs are not produced by biological processes at all. So they have a clearer technological signature than NO2,” said Haqq-Misra.
“However, CFCs are very specific manufacturing chemicals that may not be prevalent elsewhere. NO2, by comparison, is a common byproduct of any combustion process.”
The problem is, NO2 can also be produced through natural processes such as volcanoes and lightning. This means that observations of NO2 can be a false positive for life. Co-author Giada Arney from NASA Goddard explains detection needs to be run through a model that estimates the maximum amount of NO2 an alien world can have from natural sources.
“If we observe more NO2 than our model suggests from non-industrial sources, then other NO2 might be linked to industrial activity. But there is always the possibility of false positives in the search for extraterrestrial life, and more research is needed to prove it,” said Arney.
It’s also possible that clouds and aerosols in a planet’s atmosphere could be mistaken for a sign of NO2. So looking for pollution in another world would require more sophisticated computer models to help filter out all these potential false positives.
This search will also require hundreds of hours of observation using large telescopes in the future, and a much larger amount of time. Fortunately, a new generation of large telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, could soon see the first light in years to come. Perhaps their first few tasks will be to find the polluting fumes that are produced alien.
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