An aquatic world ruled by octopus-like creatures. A planet divided by light and darkness where the sun never rises. And a lava hell where molten rock rains from the sky.
Although they may seem like descriptions of strange worlds in science fiction novels, These are some of the ‘exoplanets’ most likely to host aliens.
Dozens of these exoplanets, planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, that have been classified as “potentially habitable” or “Earth-like” have been documented in fascinating detail in a new book.
In Alien Earths, Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, former NASA mission reviewer, writes that astronomical advances over the past three decades have meant we are living in “an entirely new golden age of exploration.”
Since 1992, when the first exoplanet was discovered, 5,000 more have been confirmed in our galaxy alone. Of them, 70 have just the right elements for life to exist.
Since some of them are 17,000 light years away, Dr. Kaltenegge says humanity’s next challenge will be to gather the creativity necessary to detect and communicate with extraterrestrial life forms. .
“I hope to convey how difficult the search for extraterrestrial life will be,” Dr. Kaltenegger writes in her book. “We may not even recognize it when it’s staring us in the face.”
Telescope captures a volley of aligned protostellar eruptions
“Solving the riddle of these new worlds requires using a wide range of tools, such as growing colorful biota in our biology laboratory and reaching back into the long history of Earth’s evolution for clues about what to look for,” he explained.
Dr. Kaltenegger, who is also the founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and a professor, said that Earth will have to become “our laboratory” as we test new ideas about how life might evolve differently in the galaxy.
At this time, according to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico, 29 of the rocky exoplanets identified are the most likely to support life, or at least life as we know it on Earth.
Approximately 41 more, astronomers report, They seem to be “water worlds” or mini versions of the planet Neptune, making them possible, although less likely, candidates also for extraterrestrial life.
NASA’s massive $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021 and collects light from distant space with a mirror six times larger than its famous predecessorHubble, has caused a bonanza of these new exoplanet discoveries.
“JWST is the first telescope capable of capturing with its 6.5 meter mirror enough light to explore the chemical composition of the atmosphere of other rocky worlds,” Dr. Kaltenegger told Big Think.
According to Dr. Kaltenegger, signs of extraterrestrial life on other worlds They are “written in the light of a planet, if you know how to read it.”
When light from distant stars passes through or bounces off an exoplanet’s atmosphere, as she put it, “the chemical composition of an alien world’s atmosphere is encoded in the light that reaches my telescope.”
More distant planets, like that lava world, CoRoT-7 b, 489 light-years from Earth, would be too punishing in their endless magma heat to support life.
but here there is Only three of the distant star systems whose exoplanets have offered provocative clues in their light that they may harbor undiscovered extraterrestrial life.
Kepler-62: a global ocean star system
“Life that never left the oceans could be fascinatingly stranger than we could ever imagine,” writes Dr. Kaltenegger in “Alien Earths.”
And the ‘orange dwarf’ star Kepler-62, approximately 980 light years from our solar system, has at least two probable aquatic worlds orbiting around it: Kepler 62-e and Kepler 62-f.
Both exoplanets are between Earth and Neptune in size.with Kepler 62-f being one of the “most promising planets discovered” to host extraterrestrial life according to a 2015 NASA research paper. But what could live there?
“The octopus-like creatures, heptapods, imagined in Ted Chiang’s 1998 science fiction novel, Story of Your Life, the basis of the 2016 film Arrival, pass through my mind when I think of great ocean worlds”said Dr. Kaltenegger.
In director Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 sci-fi drama, tall, tentacled alien creatures teach a human linguist played by Amy Adams a language that literally changes her perceptions of space and time.
Aliens would be living disguised as humans, according to a recent Harvard study
Trappist-1: Sunset Worlds of Glowing Algae
Just 40 light years from Earth, a very compact group of exoplanets orbiting the red sun Trappist-1 It appears to have three neighboring worlds located within its “habitable zone,” and all of them could support life, according to Dr. Kaltenegger.
“How much would our space travel capabilities advance,” Alien Earths asks, “if there were another habitable world orbiting our Sun, much less several.”
Of the seven exoplanets closest to Trappist-1, called Trappist-1b to Trappist-1h, two have drawn the most attention from astronomers for their mild temperatures and other “perfect” characteristics: Trappist-1e and Trappist-1f.
With a mass just under 70 percent the size of Earth, Trappist-1e orbits its sun just 2.7 million miles away, a mere fraction of the 93.6 million miles between Earth and the sun. .
Trappist-1f, which is only four percent larger than Earthorbits the star not much further, just 3.6 million miles away.
In fact, some scientists believe there is a strong possibility that extraterrestrial life on Trappist-1e could be studying our own planet from a distance, if they had telescopes as sophisticated as NASA’s James Webb Telescope in operation.
Proxima Centauri – the sun never sets
One of our solar system’s closest neighbors, the Proxima Centauri star system, It is only 4.25 light-years away, or about one-tenth the distance of star systems like Trappist-1.
Its “most likely habitable” world, Proxima Centauri b, is tidally locked to its host star, meaning, in Dr. Kaltenegger’s words, it is a planet “where the sun never sets or rises.”
She imagines life congregating around the ring of permanent dusk or dawn, depending on one’s perspective, that separates the light and dark sides of Proxima Centauri b, enjoying just the right amount of solar energy from its star to survive.
“Puffy red clouds fill an orange sky, high above the purple moss that dots the few exposed islands on the horizon,” he writes in Alien Earths. “The waves break on the small stretches of coast, shining in the red light of the sun.”
Passing a flashlight beyond the border to the dark side of Proxima Centauri b, Dr. Kaltenegger continues, one could probably discover that many species evolved to generate light on their own. (YO)
