Astroboffins order most advanced spectrograph ever to sniff out alien life The European Southern Observatory (ESO) this week signed a deal with a group of scientific institutions to build a spectrograph that can scan space for the chemical signatures of alien life. The ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (ANDES) will be mounted onto the ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ETL) in the southern …
Always fascinates me how they cannot reliably detect anything on planets that are right here next to us, but that shiny oil drum with a wind pump stand attached to it that is going to smell out alien life trillions of lightyears away. Even worse: as soon as ET life is somehow detected, someone here on earth will almost certainly immediately try to steal the aliens' data or break into their bank accounts. ("Hi! I'm a representative from Intergalactic Digital Research and there seems to be a problem with your Xerox Star that I will fix for you remotely").
It's because these instruments look at the local sunlight light passing through the planet's atmosphere. Only Venus and Mercury ever get between us and the sun and the former has no atmosphere and the latter the light is somewhat swamped by the proximity of the sun.
Even still the results from spectrographic analysis are not easy to interpret and different teams will get different results from the same data so there's still a lot left to understand in this field and better instruments like this will help to reduce the uncertainty.
To the best of my knowledge...
>Can't we analyse the light from other stars, when outer planets pass through it?
Yup. We do. That's how we get information on extrasolar planets' atmosphere.
>Supplementarty question, would this gizmo work rather better if it wasn't looking through our atmosphere?
Yup. Building giant telescopes in space is too expensive, though. We do build telescopes in space, but they are not giant.
Any life they will "detect" with this will be life of sufficient ongoing activity so as to substantially modify a planet's atmosphere, as on earth; it is unlikely to detect some minimal presence clinging on in some survival niche (as presumably might, at best, be the case on Mars).
> is going to smell out alien life trillions of lightyears away
Nah, that's for the press release. This contraption will actually do serious science, but that's not sexy enough.
Besides, unless we are searching specifically for uncannily 21st century human-like "life", we simply don't know what to look for, except maybe some very basic things like oxygen in the atmosphere (which shouldn't occur naturally since it immediately combines with other elements to form oxides).
And oxygen in expolanet atmospheres really is something much better sensed from space telescopes, because making sure that you've subtracted out exactly the contribution from oxygen in our atmosphere and no more or less is implausibly statistically challenging.
I think ANDES is the instrument that, over a decade or so, should be accurate and stable enough to be able to do the awesome experiment 'the red-shifts of these bright quasars have increased because they're moving away' - explicitly seeing the expansion of the universe on the time-scale of a single research career is pretty cool.
And oxygen in expolanet atmospheres really is something much better sensed from space telescopes, because making sure that you've subtracted out exactly the contribution from oxygen in our atmosphere and no more or less is implausibly statistically challenging.
The oxygen in our atmosphere make no difference to the reading, the light that comes from the distanced stars in red shifted. Which means the part of the spectrum adsorbed by the alien world by the oxygen is shifted (towards the red end of the spectrum) to a different part of the spectrum to what is absorbed when going through our atmosphere.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/What_is_red_shift
I assume should read: ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) - I don't think even the French can get ETL out of that.
Total confused by a product label in French that claimed it was made in the EU but the weight was in oz. (not grams.)
Until the penny centime dropped that Etats-Unis was intended.
a very famous cartoon by David Darling.
In which an alien is crawling through the desert away from a crashed spaceship moaning.
"Ammonia! Ammonia!"
Just because life on Earth is carbon based doesn't mean that on some distant world where it is a balmy 325C and
even your average extremothermophile is going to have a bad day, doesn't mean that something exotic like
liquid metal life based on using exotic radiochemistry which happens to be a pet theory of mine, can't exist.
Life will find a way.
https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/A/ammonialife.html
Life needs energy. Fire is a good source of energy, and fire is actually oxidation of carbo-hydrates. So energy from oxygen+carbon+hydrogen is quite easy to get, and these materials are abundant in our universe. Which doesn't say that any other chemistry is absolutely excluded, but still, oxygen is a very likely sign of life, and any life on great scale will probably be based on oxygen.
"Just because life on Earth is carbon based doesn't mean that on some distant world where it is a balmy 325C .... that something exotic ... can't exist."
True, but any exotic non-carbon-based life still has to conform to the same universal physical and chemical laws. Even exceedingly simple biological entities like viruses are composed of highly complex chemical chains, which are simply not possible to build with metallic elements (the most often-touted alternative to carbon-based life is silicon, based on some of it's chemical characteristics).
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