The theory of us being unique in Cosmos might soon get challenged
The search for exoplanets has been going for almost three decades — The breakthrough came in 1992 when radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Over the years we have taken huge strides in refining the process to explore exoplanets and at the last count, the number of such discoveries stood at 4,043.
Unfortunately, all these discoveries have led to rocky, barren landscapes with deadly eruptions. Nothing that comes close to what we have where on our beautiful blue planet. Even with the most advanced telescopes, we are only able to conclude that these exoplanets are in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ — the planet is just the right distance from its star to have the temperatures where water can exist in liquid form & hopefully host alien life.
But according to new research, there could be different types of exoplanets out there where life can thrive even more than here on Earth. A geophysicist Stephanie Olson from the University of Chicago & her team have developed a computer modeling software called ROCKE-3D. The software has the capability to model rocky exoplanets.
The team used different parameters to model a range of exoplanets to determine which one would be most suited to sustain life, based on ocean circulation. The ocean circulation is an important parameter in determining the habitability of an exoplanet. This is the process by which oceans bring life-supporting nutrients from the depths to the surface, where organisms capable of photosynthesis can benefit from them.
In our own solar system, we know now that Mars once had water & other moons in our solar system like Europa, Enceladus, Callisto and Ganymede all have liquid oceans (not of water though) and very thin atmospheres with unhospitable climatic conditions.
Thousands of exoplanets, however, might be much better candidates suiting the criteria for of hospitable environment. Scientists have estimated that 35% of all known exoplanets which are bigger than Earth could be really rich in water. And now there is a way to confirm this hypothesis.
Apart from the primary criterion of being located in the habitable zone, the new modeling software concludes that habitable exoplanets would need to have thick atmospheres, slow rotation speeds, and multiple continents. These new parameters could be added to the future searches of exoplanets to short-list candidates that might be as habitable as our own planet if not more.
Medium | Twitter | LinkedIn | StockTwits | Telegram
