Measuring The Atmospheres Of Other Worlds To See If There Are Enough Nutrients For Life
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they're what life needs.
Scientists are getting a handle on detecting exoplanets that might be warm enough to have liquid water on their surfaces, habitability's most basic signal. But now, they're looking to up their game by finding CHNOPS in exoplanet atmospheres.
We're only at the beginning of understanding how exoplanets could support life. To grow our understanding, we need to understand the availability of CHNOPS in planetary atmospheres.
A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server examines the issue. It's titled "Habitability constraints by nutrient availability in atmospheres of rocky exoplanets." The lead author is Oliver Herbort from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Vienna and an ARIEL post-doctoral fellow. The paper has been accepted by the International Journal of Astrobiology.
At our current technological level, we're just beginning to examine exoplanet atmospheres. The JWST is our main tool for the task, and it's good at it. But the JWST is busy with other tasks. In 2029, the ESA will launch ARIEL, the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large survey. ARIEL will be solely focused on exoplanet atmospheres.
In anticipation of that telescope's mission, Herbort and his co-researchers are preparing for the results and what they mean for habitability. "The detailed understanding of the planets itself becomes important for interpreting observations, especially for the detection of biosignatures," they write. In particular, they're scrutinizing the idea of aerial biospheres. "We aim to understand the presence of these nutrients within atmospheres that show the presence of water cloud condensates, potentially allowing the existence of aerial biospheres."
Our sister planet Venus has an unsurvivable surface. The extreme heat and pressure make the planet's surface uninhabitable by any measure we can determine. But some scientists have proposed that life could exist in Venus' atmosphere, based largely on the detection of phosphine, a possible indicator of life. This is an example of what an aerial biosphere might look like.
"This concept of aerial biospheres enlarges the possibilities of potential habitability from the presence of liquid water on the surface to all planets with liquid water clouds," the authors explain.
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