Jordi Font and Alex Gutiérrez
Barcelona (Spain), April 28 (EFE).- Spanish astronomer Ignasi Ribas leads a project with European funds to introduce improvements through artificial intelligence that accelerate the ability to identify one or more “twin” planets to the Earth in which he can there is life: “The models tell us that they are there, but the difficult thing is to see them.”
“It is not looking for a needle in a haystack,” Ribas, who is director of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (ICE-CSIC), explains in an interview with EFE. ).
With an extensive career in the search for exoplanets -those that orbit around stars other than the Sun-, Ribas has published more than 300 research papers and has recently received 2.5 million euros from the European Union (EU). to multiply the ability to discover planets like Earth and determine if there is life on them.
The scientific community has been searching for planets for more than three decades: “We have found many, more than 5,000, but we have not been able to find true twins of the Earth, circling a star like the Sun.”
And planets “are very abundant” in the Universe, since it is estimated that “there are as many stars as there are planets, so there are hundreds of billions,” according to the astronomer.
Mathematical models indicate that “in 15 percent of Sun-like stars there could be Earth-like planets, and that’s a lot of Earths in the galaxy.”
Research published in 2020, with data from NASA’s Kepler space observatory, estimates that there would be about 300 million planets in the Milky Way alone that could be habitable, similar to Earth in composition, temperature and the possibility of hosting water.
The great challenge is to be able to identify and study exo-Earths, and that is the objective of the project led by Ribas with this new injection of European funds.
Except in very specific cases, what scientists observe through telescopes on Earth and in space is not a photo of the planet, but the effect it has on its star, so what they measure is starlight.
But stars like the Sun are changeable, they have spots that move and regions that are brighter than the rest of the star.
These elements act as a kind of “noise” that makes it difficult to observe the planet when it passes in front of its star, which is known as the transit, and also complicates the study of the small oscillations of the planet when it orbits its star, which It is known as radial velocity.
The objective of the project led by Ribas is “to be able to overcome these ‘noise’ obstacles and clean data to find these tiny signals that are associated with the planet.”
His research group will do so by creating an “ultra-sophisticated” artificial star using artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate “millions of ways how a star can vary.”
As if it were a ‘photoshop’ filter to make an image sharper, all this information generated with AI will serve to “filter the data” that is captured from real stars, in order to elucidate what part of the variations in The observations are attributable to the activity of the star and others to the presence of a planet.
For five years, Ribas’ team will develop all these techniques to clean the data, waiting to advance knowledge.
“It is very possible that in this period we will not yet be able to find exo-Earths because it is necessary to accumulate data for years, but we will have all the machinery ready to clean this data from telescopes on Earth and in space,” he assures.
Although exo-Earths can be located, Ribas makes it clear that this is an “academic exercise” to better understand the Universe and expand scientific knowledge, but not for humanity to change worlds, as if it were a “plan B” for Earth.
“To think that humans, when the Earth stops being habitable, peaceful or interesting, will go to another world to colonize it is out of reach, since they are unimaginable trips in terms of time, so it is still science fiction,” he highlights. Ribas. EFE
nac-ajs/amg
(video) (photo) (audio)
