In the world of astronomy, there would be no bigger accomplishment than finding life on a planet outside of Earth. We know there's no intelligent life in our solar system outside of Earth. There's still a chance we find some form of life on Mars or, better yet, beneath the icy crusts of moons like Enceladus or Europa, but if we want to find extraterrestrial life we might have to look to other star systems for it. That means attempting to glean information from observations made at an incredible distance, and as a new research paper published in AGU Advances points out, we might end up "finding" life that isn't really there.
In the paper, the authors explain that current telescope technology may ultimately produce false positives when researchers are trying to find signs of life in other worlds. They say that while we may be able to detect the presence of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere with greater and greater reliability, this isn't enough to declare a planet habitable, much less determine if there's life present there.
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Study warns that we might mess up when searching for life in space originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 13 Apr 2021 at 20:55:45 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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