Alien Life Could be Growing in More Places Than We Realised, Study Suggests
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Alien life could be growing in more places than we realised, study suggests:
Alien life could flourish in many more kinds of environment than we had previously realised, a new study has suggested.
In the new research, scientists found that microorganisms could survive and grow in an atmosphere made entirely of hydrogen. That suggests the same could be happening elsewhere in the universe, the researchers indicate, and that alien life could be growing in similar places.
Away from Earth, there are many exoplanets that are much bigger than our planet and have large amounts of hydrogen in their atmosphere. Those atmosphere tend to extend more than those that are similar to our atmosphere, meaning they are easier to see through the telescopes we use to scour the universe for alien planets.
[...] Researchers hope that if such microorganisms are growing on other planets, they may one day be detectable from Earth. They tend to produce a huge variety of gases, which could eventually become thick enough on their home planets that we would be able to spot them from across the universe, they suggest.
The discovery also shows how experiments in labs on Earth could help illuminate the search for alien life on other planets, they write in the study.
The paper, 'Laboratory studies on the viability of life in H2-dominated exoplanet atmospheres', is published in Nature Astronomy.
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