The odds of life on Earth are like a deck of cards. It was shuffled infinitely many times, just enough to ensure that it was sorted from Ace to King at the end. Perhaps the dealer wanted it this way. Pretty thought-provoking, isn't it?
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Table of content
0:00 Introduction
1:04 The Goldilocks zone
3:05 What we have discovered
6:33 Detection method & Tabby's star
11:13 Finding what lies beyond space
Script:
When I referred to the zone that’s comfortable enough, for abiogenesis to happen, for life to exists, and for civilizations to flourish, actually it has a name. It’s called the #Goldilocks #zone. It’s one of the best tools scientists have to begin narrowing the search for habitable worlds. By definition, it’s the orbital distance from a star where temperatures would potentially allow liquid water to form on a planet’s surface.
It might be true that billions of planets and more are in this Goldilocks zone, outside our solar system. But just what kind of life are we talking about? And how do we even define life and intelligence? For example, are we excited if we discover bacterial, single-cell organisms life?
For advanced species, like the human being, to emerge as intelligent with cognitive abilities, there’s just too many Goldilocks factors that need to occur. Like: The stability of the atmosphere and chemical composition. Consistency of temperature on the planet. The stability of the solar system. Last but not least, the stability of the galaxy.
Just a slight tweak to those conditions, life is instantly in less than a second, crushed to nothing. Dissolved to nothing. You’ll suffocate to death, and at the same time roasted to ashes, which are then blown instantly away. Perhaps not the best one second of your life, is it?
Propelled by curiosity and ingenuity, humankind is strived to find the answer to this bigger question: is there life out there on another planet? If so, how did it emerge? And also.. what can we learn about it, to understand how we came to be on our home planet.
As stars move across the night sky, people of the ancient world have wondered about their place in the universe. Babylonian and Egyptian astronomers inherited a few insights that later became the basis for modern astronomy.
The modern search for extraterrestrial life has been around since the 1980s. Back then, by just using a rather simple telescope of 2.5 m long, scientists could detect this planetary disk. Just a bunch of dust and gas around the star Beta Pictoris. Fast forward to early 1990, that’s really when the discovery of exoplanets skyrocketed.
And soon enough, the first exoplanets were discovered. These planets were specifically weird in a way. Instead of orbiting a star like our planet, these two orbit a pulsar. If you don’t know what that is, imagine a rotating star, but emits electromagnetic radiation from the two poles.
It is estimated that there is at least one planet for every star in the galaxy. This means that there’s something in the order of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and many of them have a similar size to Earth.
So far, NASA scientists have discovered 4000+ exoplanets mostly within a 3000 light-year distance from Earth. This brings us to a few exoplanets with distinct uniqueness that’s worth mentioning.
Here’s a poster from NASA about the planet HD 40307 g.
Experience the gravity of this planet, because one thing is for sure, the gravitational pull here is much, much stronger than Earth.
Kepler-16b. It’s unique because it orbits two stars, just like Tatooine in Star Wars. Imagine how cool that would be to wake up and see double shadows like this.
Kepler-186f. Where the grass is always redder on the other side. This is completely hypothetical as of now, but future space observation could provide an answer of whether there’s an atmosphere, water and thus grass on the surface.
But one question you might ask up until this point, what’s up with all the weird names and numbering with these exoplanets? The International Astronomical Union (IAU) set a guideline that dictates the naming of these exoplanets. In summary, the first word is either named after their star or the telescope that finds them.
Speaking of discovery, this brings us to: how could these exoplanets be detected? What modern methods did we use to discover them?
Many methods have been developed to find these planetary bodies. Some of them are radial velocity and gravitational microlensing. But the most used and the most prolific form of finding exoplanets is what astronomers call ‘transit’. A method in which an exoplanet transits the host star and thus reduces the star’s light.
2 июн 2024