By Tone Skredderbakken
Exoplanetary missions advance the search for other lifeforms and habitable places in the universe, with Australian researchers actively involved in the planet-hunt.
Professor Chris Tinney at the University of New South Wales says as far as scientists know, almost every star in the universe could host a planet, yet less than ten would satisfy our habitability criteria.
He says the technology for discovering life on other planets will not be available for decades, but points out that Australia is currently very active in exoplanetary research.
”[We are] searching for planets orbiting other stars, trying to understand how planet formation works, (…) how common habitable planets are, and producing the lists of systems that we can search for bio signatures when the facilities become available to do that over the decades ahead,” he said.
Image Credit: NASA, Joel Kowsky, flickr
“We currently discover planets by looking for the impact they have on their host stars themselves – either transiting their host star regularly, making it very slightly dimmer or detecting the relex orbit of the host-star as its planet orbits it.”
NASA scientists are already preparing for their next mission on the journey to Mars, where a stationary lander is scheduled to launch in 2016, according to a media release last week.
Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, Jim Green says humans and robotics will pioneer Mars and the solar system together.
According to Professor Peter Quinn at the University of Western Australia, most of the planet-hunting are currently being done with telescopes on Earth and in space, yet both NASA´s Europa and the Mars One manned missions are highly realistic and important projects in the near future.
“Finding a habitable planet is important because it will give us some idea of how common they are and therefore how rare or common the Earth is,” he said.
”Finding signs of life would be a major achievement and would help us better understand how life evolves in different environments and perhaps where life itself may have originated”.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Science credit NASA, ESA, A. Mandell (Goddard Space FlightCenter), and D. Deming (University of Maryland, College Park)
Professor Chris Tinney is positive to the development in technology and the future of exoplanetary research, but points out that the realistic timeframe of finding extraterrestrial life is far longer than in a science fiction movie.
“If we find habitable planets, they will be orbiting other stars,” he said.
“We will have no way of even sending probes to other stars on timescales of less than hundred years, so for a very long time, all we could do is look at the signatures of biological activities in the light coming from the star and planet”.
Cosmospolitan 