Life on other planets – The earthlings have always been curious to discover, invent and make a living better. The research has extended beyond improving life on Earth to finding life outside Earth. Its for both the existence of living species and for possibilities of the human species to live outside Earth. There are several ways this could be used for & exploited for it. While Space tourism is just another concept of a weekend break or innovative concept weddings in the plan, there are more prominent causes beyond it.
More luxury living plans to the niche and slowly move to a clearing area on Earth’s life gets the latest. Let’s explore the exciting findings on such missions that search for life on other planets!
Table of Contents
EXOBIOLOGY
The solar system appears vacant; I hope they are not on a long Covid-19 like a curfew. The massive gap between the planets by providing a safe moving distance for their neighbors makes them unreachable and knows if other stars had worlds of their own As for life beyond the solar system. Since those drab days, exobiology’s vision brightened our researches. Hence Astrobiology, aka exobiology, is related to studying the origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the Universe. It considers whether extraterrestrial life exists and, if it does, how humans can detect it. Research findings have vastly increased the probabilities that life exists elsewhere in the solar system.
ECO DIVERSITY
Significant exobiology discoveries, though, were made here on Earth. While we believed not much life is possible without the Sun’s optimal touch and believed microbes kill at high temperature, the researchers draw a sketch where life is much more robust, wide range, and complex than most scientists believed 30 years ago. Microorganisms have found living in intimidating zones where we would have never thought of; under the oceans, near the volcanic vents, a few microbes species grow and multiply at very high temperatures.
SURVIVAL SECRET
The existence of these extremophile organisms changed our view on the basic needs to survive. Yes, these species live without Sun, without heat, without organic molecules to consume- just by living on raw minerals and fuel themselves with essential chemical reactions. These creatures’ genetic code suggests that they are not recent adaptations that have moved away from ‘mainstream life’ but are among the oldest living things on Earth. Applying the inferences out of these onto other planets strengthens life elsewhere in the solar system. All required for life is some moisture and a form of energy.
EXOBIOLOGY & MARS – THE LIFE ON OTHER PLANET
Mars remains the best candidate for an extraterrestrial organism’s research for its proximity to the habitat zone. In the early solar system, Mars may offer better prospects for life than the Earth. NASA scientists found what may have got on as fossils are those Martian bacterial in a meteorite blasted by cosmic rays from the planet’s surface in 1998. European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express sat on the Martian orbit in 2003; the Aurora Programmed looks at plans for a sample return mission and even a human tour. There’s a probability for the Earth’s Antarctic life-forms to live on Mars.
After a series of failures, July 1965 saw the first successful mission of Mars with the US Mariner 4 spacecraft that clicked close views of another planet that revealed the impact-cratered Martian surface. Post this if you kicked off more than 20 successful missions on this red plant.
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DETECT THE PRESENCE OF LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS
Here, the James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2021, could get the first close glimpses of the gas mixture in the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. Hubble plays an very important role in finding the life on other planets with a clear pictures. Future telescopes might even pick up signs of photosynthesis – the transformation of light into chemical energy by plants – or even gases or molecules suggesting the presence of animal life. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and hi technological can help detect life from afar.
HABITABLE ZONE
The space outside Earth is vast, the Universe in itself! Where to focus the search missions? There’s this “habitable zone,” the orbital distance from a star where temperatures would potentially allow liquid water to form on the surface of the planet. The weather is not too hot in this area and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surrounding planets’ surface. It observes in a range of orbits around a star. A planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure—the habitable zone in our Solar System range between 0.38 & 10.0 au.
EXOPLANETS
Exoplanets are those planets found beyond our Solar system. Now we explore the life on these planets. Most planets orbit other stars, but free-floating exoplanets, rogue planets, orbit the galactic center, do not get relative to any star. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope revealed there are more planets than stars in the galaxy. Hence, we now live in a universe of exoplanets. The count of confirmed planets in this known galaxy is in the thousands and rising. The first exoplanet discovery in the 1990s, and since then, we’ve identified thousands. It’s rare for astronomers to see an exoplanet through telescopes the way a Saturn sees through Earth.
HD 209458 b
The search in this zone grew huge in 2000 when Hubble studied the exoplanet HD 209458 b and the first extrasolar planet known to make “transits” across the face of its star. Hubble was the first telescope to detect an exoplanet’s atmosphere directly. The star’s small amount of light absorbs the gas in the planet’s atmosphere when a planet passes between us and the star, leaving chemical “fingerprints” in the star’s light. For HD 209458 b, Hubble detected traces of sodium that did not belong to the star. It was due to the sodium gas found in the atmosphere of the planet. With this start, it discovered more planets transiting their stars. With the exoplanet HD 189733 b, which was identifying 63 light-years away, Hubble detected methane, which identified as the first organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.
Trappist-1
In 2017, Belgian astronomers announced that the Trappist-1 star has seven Earth-sized planets orbiting it. Thirty-nine light-years away, this solar system was similar to the one we are in it. Of this, at least three of the planets are in the habitable zone. It found the Trappist-1 planets using the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (Trappist) in Chile, and other Earth-based telescopes.
Ongoing research and inferences from the past explorations hint at exoplanets’ existence around several other stars with disks, including TW Hydrae, HD 141569, and Beta Pictoris.
HD 28185b
In April 2001, HD 28185b was the First planet found within the “habitable zone” announced by the Geneva University, and that orbits about the same distance from its star as Earth does from the Sun. This one is approximately six times bigger than that of Jupiter and is the first to be found in the “habitable zone” around a star, where life could exist.
Within our Solar System
Now its time to explore the life on other planets in our own solar system. First we look into Europa – The moon of Jupiter.
Europa
The Icy moons of Jupiter, especially Europa, are promising with evidence of matter. Many missions have had a glimpse of Jupiter and its moons on transit to other places. Still, Nasa’s Galileo mission was the first to orbit the planet and study its moons exclusively. It navigated a dozen times between 1995 & 2003 to collect images and data.
EUROPA’S TEXTURE
These data collected show a layered structure like Earth with an iron-rich core, a rocky mantle, and an ice crust. Magnetic metrics show electric current, consistent with a salty liquid ocean beneath the thick crust of ice around the whole planet. Also, the photographs show a vast frozen area with cracks. Doesn’t all these sound familiar?
Ganymede
Ganymede, a Jupiter satellite, is the largest and the most massive moon of our Solar System. Here, it is the largest without a substantial atmosphere though counted as the ninth-largest object in the Solar System. Its diameter of 5,268 km (3,273 mi) makes it 26% larger than the planet Mercury by volume, while it is only 45% as massive. It builds on a metallic core. It also has the lowest moment of inertia factor of any solid body found in the Solar System and is only the moon known to have a magnetic field.
GANYMEDE’S TEXTURE
Silicate rock and water are equally present. It is iron-rich with an internal ocean that may contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Its surface is composed of two types of terrain – Dark regions, saturated with impact craters & then the Lighter areas, chiseled for extensive ridges from the remaining. Therefore, the cause of the light terrain’s disrupted geology is being studied but believes to be a result of tectonic response to tidal heating.
GANYMEDE’S INTERACTION FIELDS
The magnetic field here is probably creating by convection within its liquid iron core. The magnetic field is buried within Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field and would show only as a local vibrant of the field lines. Ganymede has oxygen and atomic hydrogen atmospheric.
Callisto
Callisto, again a moon of Jupiter, is the second-largest, after Ganymede. Also, it is the third-largest moon of our Solar System itself. It surrounds by a fragile atmosphere of carbon dioxide and molecular oxygen. Here, Callisto finds to have formed by a slow lump from the disk of the gas and dust that surrounded Jupiter after its formation. Callisto’s gradual build of deposits and the lack of tidal heating shows that not enough heat was available for quick distinction. It could have led to forming a subsurface ocean at a depth of 100–150 km.
The likely presence of an ocean within Callisto throws evidence for life. Space missions like Pioneers 10 and 11 to Galileo and Cassini have watched Callisto. With its low radiations, Callisto lists it as the most suitable place for a human base for the Jovian system’s future exploration.
Enceladus
Jupiter’s neighbor Saturn’s moons are also top targets in searching for life, especially Enceladus and Titan. Cassini that arrived in the Saturn system in 2001, actively worked until 2017 to conduct 23 flybys of Enceladus and 127 of Titan. These data collected from these observations found no evidence for life then.
What are Voyager golden record contents
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Titan
Here, Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and is the second-largest natural satellite in our Solar System. The only moon is known to have a closely packed atmosphere and the only body other than Earth, where clear evidence of surface liquid has to find. Thus, Titan is one of seven gravitationally rounded moons in orbit around Saturn and the second farthest from Saturn of the seven moons. More often described as a planet-like moon, Titan is 50% larger in diameter than Earth’s Moon and 80% more massive. Titan orbits Saturn at 20 Saturn radii.
TITAN’S TEXTURE
Titan is composed of ice and rocky material, which is likely differentiating into a rocky core encircling by various layers of ice, including a crust of ice and a subsurface layer of ammonia-rich liquid water. The thick atmosphere in the Titan’s surface made it un-penetrable until the Cassini–Huygens mission in 2004, discovering the liquid hydrocarbon lakes in Titan’s polar regions. The texture is found clear, with few craters, mountains, and cryo-volcanoes.
TITAN’S CLIMATE
The atmosphere is mainly composed of nitrogen. Minor components present lead to the formation of methane and ethane clouds and heavy organonitrogen haze. The winds and rain create surface features like rivers, lakes, sea, similar to those found on Earth and dominates by seasonal weather patterns as on Earth. With liquid and nitrogen atmosphere, Titan’s methane cycle the water cycle also comparable to that on Earth, even at much lower temperatures of −179.2 °C to −290.5 °F.
I wish we soon read a headline on our Newspapers & channels that we found clear proof of life and migration missions soon in the next few years, in this decade. Okay, if life on that new planet is possible, beware! – there could be species already existing – native or migrant – so there’s a threat of the earthlings harming those aliens or those aliens harming the earthlings. What if initial scans found no living creatures because they froze them due to extreme climate, which lasts for hundreds/thousands of years? It could end up as a dejavu of a theatrical experience! Fingers crossed! Hoping you have enjoyed in exploring the life on other planets present with and out of our solar system.1
