NASA ‘Should’ve Looked Twice Before Posting These Apollo Moon Mission Images’

09.06.2024 00:52

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Bigger, better, more suited for biology: let’s not overlook superhabitable planets with potential.

A superhabitable planet is one that has a better chance of supporting life than our own planet, Earth.

Because Earth is the only known inhabited planet and life on it is dependent on liquid water, efforts to find exoplanets that could support life are centered on Earth-like worlds. However, some scientists believe that other types of planets may have conditions for life that are as good as — or even better than — Earth. Indeed, some scientists argue that focusing entirely on Earth-like worlds may be too "anthropocentric and geocentric," potentially blinding us to the possibilities of exobiology.

"We are so over-focused on finding a mirror image of Earth that we may overlook a planet that is even more well-suited for life," Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University and the Technical University of Berlin.

Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues searched the Kepler Object of Interest Exoplanet Archive for potentially superhabitable exoplanets, focusing on 4,500 planetary systems with rocky planets within their stars’ habitable zones, where liquid water can persist. The researchers published their findings in the journal Astrobiology.

The scientists looked at planetary systems

with yellow dwarf stars like our sun, as well as orange dwarf stars, which are cooler, dimmer, and less massive than our sun.

"Our sun is actually not the best kind of star for hosting a planet with lots of life on it," Schulze-Makuch said.

In the Milky Way, orange dwarf stars are roughly 50% more common than yellow dwarf stars. Unlike our sun, which has an estimated lifetime of less than 10 billion years, orange dwarfs have lifetimes ranging from 20 billion to 70 billion years. Because complex life took approximately 3.5 billion years to emerge on Earth, the longer lifetimes of orange dwarf stars may allow planets within their habitable zones more time to develop life and accumulate biodiversity.

Because Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old,

the researchers hypothesized that the sweet spot for life would be a planet between 5 billion and 8 billion years old.

The size and mass of a planet can also affect how well it can support life, according to the researchers. A larger-than-Earth rocky planet would have a larger habitable surface area and possibly a thicker, more stable atmosphere. A planet 1.5 times the mass of Earth would likely retain its interior heat for a longer period of time, which would help keep its core molten and its protective magnetic field active for a longer period of time during which life could arise and evolve.

Worlds that are slightly warmer than Earth

by about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) may be habitable, as they may have larger tropical zones, which support more biodiversity on Earth. However, warmer planets might also need more moisture, since greater heat could expand deserts.

Furthermore, planets with the same land area as Earth but divided into smaller continents may be more habitable. When continents become particularly large (like Earth’s past continent Gondwana did about 500 million years ago), their centers are often located far from oceans, resulting in vast, inhospitable deserts in their interiors. Moreover, because Earth’s shallow waters support more biodiversity than its deep oceans, scientists believe that planets with shallower waters could support more life.

In total,

Schulze-Makuch and colleagues discovered 24 potentially habitable planets. None of these worlds met all of the criteria the researchers established for superhabitable planets, but one did meet at least two — KOI 5715.01.

KOI (Kepler Object of Interest) 5725.01 is a 5.5 billion-year-old planet with a diameter of 1.8 to 2.4 times that of Earth, orbiting an orange dwarf 2,965 light-years away. It may have an average surface temperature about 4.3 degrees F (2.4 degrees C) lower than Earth, but if it has more greenhouse gases to trap heat than Earth, the researchers believe it could be superhabitable.

Schulze-Makuch’s own favorite potentially superhabitable world from these 24 was KOI 5554.01. This planet is approximately 6.5 billion years old, has a diameter 0.72 to 1.29 times that of Earth, and orbits a yellow dwarf 700 light-years away.

"I really liked the average surface temperature — about 27 degrees C [80 degrees F]," Schulze-Makuch said. "And it’s probably about Earth’s size, and a little bit older than Earth."

Each of these 24 potentially habitable planets

is more than 100 light-years away from Earth. This places them too far away for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft to capture high-quality images in order to learn more about them.

After all, Schulze-Makuch explained that future spacecraft, such as NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s LUVOIR space observatory mission concept, and the European Space Agency’s PLATO space telescope, could shed light on these worlds.

"We caution that while we search for superhabitable planets, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily contain life," Schulze-Makuch said. "A planet can be habitable or superhabitable but uninhabited."

Black holes are usually considered to be enormous, aggressive, and extremely destructive structures. However, according to recent research, they are just as capable of producing stars as they are of consuming them.

Astronomers have discovered a black hole "giving birth" to stars at the center of a nearby dwarf galaxy — and the stellar newborns are held together by a massive "umbilical cord" of gas and dust.

The supermassive black hole was seen spewing a 500-light-year-long jet of ionized gas from its center at around 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h), contributing to a "firestorm" of new star formation in a nearby stellar nursery.

According to experts,

the discovery, made possible by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, is the first time that black holes have given strong indications that they stimulate star formation in very small galaxies, raising the question of what role black holes play.

The remarkable finding was described in a study published in the journal Nature.

"From the beginning, I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star-forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole," study co-author Amy Reines, an astrophysicist at Montana State University, said in a statement. "Hubble’s amazing resolution clearly shows a corkscrew-like pattern in the velocities of the gas, which we can fit to the model of a precessing, or wobbling, outflow from a black hole."

The jet’s thin tendril was observed

stretching out from the black hole and across space to a bright stellar nursery. Supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the size of stellar-mass black holes, have previously been observed emitting cosmic plumes, but astronomers originally thought that these jets hindered rather than helped star formation in dwarf galaxies.

"At only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2-10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture both images and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow very clearly, lead author Zachary Schutte, a graduate student at Montana State University, said in the statement. "The additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars."

Black holes create the jets

that spew from them by sucking in material from nearby gas clouds or stars and slingshotting it back into space as blazing plasma traveling near the speed of light. If heated sufficiently, the gas clouds that collide with the jet will become ideal nurseries for future stars.

However, getting to that Goldilocks zone is critical; according to NASA, if the jets heat up the gas clouds too much, they may lose their ability to cool back down in the way needed for star formation. But with the gentle, less-massive outflow from the black hole in Henize 2-10 created ideal gas conditions for star formation.

Because this black hole

has remained relatively small over time, the researchers believe that studying it in greater detail will help them understand the smaller origins of larger supermassive black holes in the universe, as well as the processes that caused them to balloon to such massive scales. Furthermore, the team’s high-resolution method for detecting the black hole’s dim signature can now be used to find others like it.

"The era of the first black holes is not something that we have been able to see, so it really has become the big question: Where did they come from?" Reines said. "Dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of the black hole seeding scenario that has otherwise been lost to time and space."

Mars, unlike Earth, has not suffered a continental drift or a shift in its plate tectonics which has left billions of years old rocks intact, says the study.

For many years, scientists have claimed that life on Earth may have begun with amino acids brought to our planet by incoming meteorites. A new team of scientists recently announced a significant breakthrough in determining the origin of life and explaining how it came to be. Interestingly, the experts also suggested that the aforementioned factor could have been responsible for the origin of life on Earth’s neighbor, Mars.

How did life originate on Earth?

According to Elisa Biondi’s study, which was published in the journal Astrobiology, ribonucleic acid (RNA), an analog of DNA, was most likely the first genetic material for life on Earth. The RNA spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass, which was abundant on our planet approximately 4.35 billion years ago, according to experts at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution.

Stephen Mojzsis, another study contributor, explained that basaltic glass formed due to an abundance of molten basaltic lava. It is clear that the Earth was exposed to heavy impacts for millions of years and experienced rampant volcanic activity, which resulted in an abundance of basaltic lava and thus basaltic glass. "Impacts also evaporated water to give dry land, providing aquifers where RNA could have formed", Mojzsis added as per Phys.org. The study also highlighted that the percolation of nucleoside triphosphate through basaltic glass produces long RNA molecules of 100-200 nucleotides in length.

How does this relate to Mars?

The aforementioned discovery is important because experts believe that similar basaltic glass can be found on Mars. This implies that the formation of RNA on Mars must have occurred at some point, possibly leading to the origin of life. "If life emerged on Earth via this simple path, then it also likely emerged on Mars," Steven Benner said in a statement as per Phys.org. "This makes it even more important to seek life on Mars as soon as we can."

The experts reached this conclusion because it is clear that Mars has not experienced continental drift or a shift in plate tectonics, leaving billions of years old rocks intact. Meanwhile, whether or not life existed on Mars will be clear once NASA retrieves the rock samples collected by its Perseverance rover, which is expected to happen in the early 2030s.