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Scientists develop new method for finding aliens

Scientists develop new method for finding aliens

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Scientistssay they have developed a powerful new model to detect life on planets outside of our solar system, more accurately than ever before. The new model focuses on methane, the simplest organic molecule, widely acknowledged to be a sign of potential life. Researchers from University College London in the U.K. and the ...



Scientistssay they have de­vel­oped a pow­er­ful new mod­el to de­tect life on plan­ets out­side of our so­lar sys­tem, more ac­cu­rately than ev­er be­fore.

The new mod­el fo­cus­es on meth­ane, the sim­plest or­gan­ic mol­e­cule, widely ac­knowl­edged to be a sign of po­ten­tial life.

Re­search­ers from Uni­vers­ity Col­lege Lon­don in the U.K. and the Uni­vers­ity of New South Wales in Aus­tral­ia de­vel­oped a new meth­od to de­tect the mol­e­cule at tem­per­a­tures above that of Earth, up to 1220 de­grees Cel­si­us, some­thing not pos­si­ble be­fore.

To find out what re­mote plan­ets or­bit­ing oth­er stars are made of, as­tro­no­mers an­a­lyze the way in which their at­mo­spheres ab­sorb star­light of dif­fer­ent col­ors. They then com­pare that to a mod­el, or “spec­trum,” to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent mol­e­cules.

“Cur­rent mod­els of meth­ane are in­com­plete, lead­ing to a sev­ere un­der­es­tima­t­ion of meth­ane lev­els on plan­ets,” said Jon­a­than Ten­ny­son, a phys­i­cist at Uni­vers­ity Col­lege Lon­don. “We an­ti­cipate our new mod­el will have a big im­pact on the fu­ture study of plan­ets and ‘cool' stars ex­ter­nal to our so­lar sys­tem, po­ten­tially help­ing sci­en­tists iden­ti­fy signs of ex­tra­ter­res­tri­al life.”

“The com­pre­hen­sive spec­trum we have cre­at­ed has only been pos­si­ble with the as­ton­ish­ing pow­er of mod­ern su­per­com­put­ers which are needed for the bil­lions of lines re­quired for the mod­eling,” added the stu­dy's lead au­thor, Sergei Yurchenko, al­so of the uni­vers­ity.

“We lim­it­ed the tem­per­a­ture thresh­old,” he added, “to fit the ca­pa­city avail­a­ble, so more re­search could be done to ex­pand the mod­el to high­er tem­per­a­tures still. Our cal­cula­t­ions re­quired about three mil­lion CPU (cen­tral pro­cess­ing un­it) hours alone,” he said.

“We are thrilled to have used this tech­nol­o­gy to sig­nif­i­cantly ad­vance be­yond pre­vi­ous mod­els avail­a­ble for re­search­ers stu­dying po­ten­tial life on as­tro­nom­i­cal ob­jects, and we are ea­ger to see what our new spec­trum helps them dis­cov­er.”

The mod­el has been tested and ver­i­fied by re­pro­duc­ing the way meth­ane in failed stars, called brown dwarfs, ab­sorbs light, the re­search­ers added. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Cite This Article as
worldscience, "Scientists develop new method for finding aliens", MachPrinciple, June 20, 2014, https://machprinciple.com/post/scientists-develop-new-method-for-finding-aliens

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