A group of astronomers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory has discovered a way to rank exoplanets according to habitability, which had never been done before for planets outside of our own solar system.
Why do we need this ranking? Well, it would better help us discern which planets are best fit for colonizing.
The Habitability Index for Transiting Planets
All research, authored by professor Rory Barnes is published in the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal, and the data names the new metric “the habitability index for transiting planets’. Barnes, who teaches astronomy at the University of Washington, declares that he and his team have conceived a way of taking all observational data available to develop a system that would help astronomers decide which planets, of the hundreds suspected of life sustainability, is actually worth the attention.
So far, the Kepler Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to observe thousands of planets beyond the solar system, and these planets are called exoplanet. A few hundreds are suspected of having the appropriate conditions to become inhabited judging from similarities to Earth.
A Growing Process
With the James Webb Space Telescope, still in development, astronomers will be able to measure the actual atmospheric composition of certain planets. The telescope is scheduled to launch in 2018, and it hopes to greatly increase the chances of finding other planets that could sustain life, and could even possibly be home to extraterrestrials.
The way that exoplanet atmospheres have been examined so far is simple, but it’s very time consuming. Astronomers have to wait for these planets to transit their host star or pass in front of it, and then all the light from the star will be blocked, which gives scientists the opportunity to explore the surface.
TESS to Aid the Efforts
There is a telescope that’s set to be built especially for that in 2017, to be called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. It will use spectroscopy technologies that will enable astronomers to hunt for life with maximum effectiveness.
This new scheme was designed in order to get a better idea of exoplanetary atmosphere exploration before the launch of the TESS and the James Space Telescope. The access to these will be no doubt very expensive, and the work may be as time-consuming as it currently is, but it will help astronomers to focus on planets that could harbor life with limited resources, and the new index developed will help estimate the rockiness and atmospheric composition, as well as the possibility of these planets holding any water.
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