Quest for extraterrestrial life not over: experts
April 19, 2014
The planet, dubbed Kepler-186f, is the 1st of this size located orbiting its star at a distance that would allow it to have liquid water-a prerequisite for the improvement of life, regardless of whether primitive or complicated.
But no matter if it has any, we may perhaps never ever know.
"Unfortunately, the technique is too far away and also faint to know far more," Heike Rauer of the German Aerospace Centre's Institute for Planetary Analysis told AFP.
"We never know for certain no matter whether it is rocky, we do not know for certain that it has an atmosphere, what this atmosphere is produced of, or that it has water," she mentioned.
"We know how we want to measure it: by taking a spectrum of the atmosphere, but with present and next foreseen technologies, we can't take this spectrum."
Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at France's CNRS national analysis centre who was a member of the team that found the planet, agreed we will not know how hospitable Kepler-186f is for pretty some time. If ever.
"We are not even close to having the suggests with which to take these measurements," he mentioned. "We will have to wait for the next generation of space telescopes, in 10 or 20 years."
Are we alone?
The exoplanet, some 500 lightyears from Earth, shows that potentially habitable worlds can exist.
Other exoplanets located inside their stars' habitable zones have been gas giants-this one's size may perhaps imply it is a rocky planet, an additional situation for life to take root.
Science has invested much time and sources into finding so-known as exoplanets, which revolve about stars other than our Sun.
The quest is targeted mainly at answering the query: "Are we alone?", but also to discover clues as to how and why life on Earth started.
Rauer, who will head the European Space Agency's (ESA) PLATO planet-hunting mission, due for launch in 2024, said the very first dedicated searches started in the mid-1990's, with telescopes on the ground measuring the mass of distance planets.
This was followed in the subsequent decade by satellites figuring out their radius.
NASA's Kepler space observatory, which spotted the new planet, was committed exclusively to the activity of discovering exoplanets-it has found 3,600 planet candidates of which 961 have been confirmed so far.
Future missions like PLATO will seek to detect Earth-like planets orbiting stars that are brighter than Kepler-186f and closer to our personal planet-which must make it simpler to detect life, if there is any.
"In the subsequent decades, we will be capable to get answers, but in other systems" than Kepler-186f, stated Rauer.
Fabio Favata, coordinator of ESA's science and robotics exploration programme, mentioned that when Kepler-186f is the only planet of its size located in a habitable zone to date, that may well quickly modify.
"We are in a golden era of exoplanet discoveries. So far it is exceptional, but will it keep so? I am prepared to bet you revenue that it won't."
The search for a planet capable of hosting life remains an academic pursuit-there is no solar method close adequate for mankind to ever attain it, unless we develop time travel.
Kepler-186f is so far from Earth that "if you could construct a best spaceship that can travel close to the speed of light, to go there and back would nonetheless take more than 1,000 years," stated Favata.
