Scientists have developed a new method to identify habitable planets and potentially inhabited planets by comparing the amount of carbon dioxide in their atmosphere to neighbouring planets. The study shows that if a planet has reduced amounts of carbon dioxide in atmosphere when compared to neighbouring planets, that planet could have liquid water on its surface.
That is because this drop in carbon dioxide implies that some of it is being dissolved into an ocean or maybe even captured by a planet-scakle biomass. Finding out water on exoplanets is an important step towards discovering potentially habitable distant worlds, which is crucial in the search for extraterrestrial life.
When scientists say a planet or other celestial body is habitable, they mean that it is capable of hosting and retaining liquid water on its surface. Some planets like Venus are too close to the Sun which means that any water present vapourise. Some others like Mars are so far from their stars that any water that exists will be frozen. The habitable zone between is called the “goldilocks zone.”
One method of identifying whether a planet has liquid water is using “glint,” or how starlight reflects off water. But that signature is way too weak to actually implement that method using currently available technology.
“It is fairly easy to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in a planet’s atmosphere. This is because CO2 is a strong absorber in the infrared, the same property causing the current rise in global temperatures here on Earth. By comparing the amount of CO2 in different planets’ atmospheres, we can use this new habitability signature to identify those planets with oceans, which make them more likely to be able to support life,” said Amaury Triaud, coauthor of the study published in Nature Astronomy, in a press statement.
Not only would the new method be useful for detecting habitability but it could also serve as a biosignature detector since even biology captures carbon dioxide.
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First uploaded on: 02-01-2024 at 16:29 IST
