Image by universetoday.com By Mariane McPherson
Staff Writer “I want to find another Earth. That’s what I’m living for.” Sara Seager, an MIT astrophysicist, has been looking at planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, for about 20 years. Seager believes she knows how to make the discoveries that technology creates. When the first exoplanet was discovered in the 1990s, many questioned the finding and didn’t believe it was real. But with better technology, we have observed more than 6,000 of them, and most are giant balls of gas. With so many planets coming out and being discovered, the race is on to identify one that resembles Earth: a rocky world with liquid water and suitable to host life, just like ours. "Atmospheres are important because they're a way to look for signs of life: we look at gases that don't belong and may have been produced by some life form," Seager explains. Seager did not want to simply look for distant planets, she set her eyes on something more specific-- their atmosphere --and she was the first person to do so. "If you look at a rainbow very closely, you see tiny little dark lines between the colors, pieces that are missing. Those lines are there because Earth's atmosphere is taking away some of the light,” said Seager. "It's like skunk spray: a tiny bit of sodium can make a very big signature," she says. To find life, we need small rocky planets - like ours. Comments are closed.
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