14 DAY TRIAL // The American space agency has recently announced the discovery of a second hot gas exoplanet that features organic molecules, the required components for the emergence of life. With the new find, astronomers will be one step closer to determining an accurate characterization of the planets that may, indeed, support life, as opposed to those that simply feature the molecules, but could never see the formation of amino-acids and proteins, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in a press release.
The new find “is the second planet outside our solar system in which water, methane and carbon dioxide have been found, which are potentially important for biological processes in habitable planets. Detecting organic compounds in two exoplanets now raises the possibility that it will become commonplace to find planets with molecules that may be tied to life,” study researcher Mark Swaim, from the JPL headquarters at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena, California, explains.
According to the scientists, the new planet is uninhabitable, as it's located well outside its parent star's habitable zone. However, if the same set of traits is discovered around a rocky exoplanet orbiting at the correct distance from its star, then chances would be that the planet could support life. The recently discovered exoplanet, dubbed HD 209458b, is a Jupiter-sized one and orbits its parent star well beyond the habitable zone. The entire solar system is located some 150 light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus.
The data on the planet were collected by two of NASA's four Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope (near-infrared, visible and ultraviolet light) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared wavelengths). The observatories used a technique called spectroscopy to break the light coming in from the exoplanet into its components, and then to identify the chemical signature of a large number of molecules, including the organic ones. “This demonstrates that we can detect the molecules that matter for life processes,” Swaim explains.
“The detection of organic compounds will not necessarily mean there's life on a planet, because there are other ways to generate such molecules. If we detect organic chemicals on a rocky, Earth-like planet, we will want to understand enough about the planet to rule out non-life processes that could have led to those chemicals being there. These objects are too far away to send probes to, so the only way we're ever going to learn anything about them is to point telescopes at them. Spectroscopy provides a powerful tool to determine their chemistry and dynamics,” he concludes.