Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have found a different focus for researching life on other planets. Their study shows that the important factor when looking for an environment capable of supporting life like Earth is not the amount of water in a given place, but its concentration.
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“The search for extraterrestrial life is sometimes rather simplistic in its attitude to water,” said study co-author Dr Philip Ball. Science Focus, Tuesday (6/7/2021).
Ball says, as their research shows, it’s not enough to say that liquid water equals habitability.
“We also have to think about how Earth-like organisms actually use it. How much water is actually available for that biological use,” he said.
According to calculations by researchers at Queen’s University Belfast, the water-rich clouds in the Jupiter suitable for that research.
Dr John E. Hallsworth of the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s said their research does not claim that alien life (a microbial type) does exist on other planets in our Solar System.
“It shows that if water activity and other conditions are right, then life like that can exist in places we didn’t expect before,” he said.
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When the team applied the same approach to studying Venus’ sulfuric acid clouds, they found that water activity was more than a hundred times below the lower limit of life on Earth.
On the other hand, the research team also found that the water conditions and temperature in the clouds Jupiter can allow the life of this type of microbe to survive, assuming that other requirements such as nutrition are present.
“This is a timely finding considering that NASA and the European Space Agency have just announced three missions to Venus in the coming years. One of them will take measurements of Venus’ atmosphere that we can compare with our findings,” he said.
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