SEATTLE — If life exists elsewhere in the universe, researchers at the University of Washington are finding the clues on Earth to help understand where to look for it.
For 25 years, the program has looked at how life began on Earth and how those conditions can translate to other planets in the galaxy.
The research was sparked by a few events in the late 90’s: a meteor discovered in Antarctica that originated from Mars, the discovery of an ‘exoplanet’ that was in the habitable zone around a star, and the discovery of life near the hot springs of Yellowstone and thermal vents in the depths of Earth’s oceans.
David Catling, Ph.D, is the director of the program, leading research projects to unearth more clues.
“There have been advances in trying to understand basic things, which are still open questions, like the origin of life. How did it happen? Where can life live, and what range of environments? We now know that’s much more extreme than we used to think based on discoveries on Earth,” Catling said.
Some of his discoveries have looked at ancient micrometeorites, small particles of space dust that fall to Earth.
He said most burn up in the atmosphere with oxygen or carbon dioxide as the fuel. Around 10% survive though, reforming with the elements that made them burn.
Catling invented a machine to recreate that process.
“Because they melted when they came through the ancient atmosphere, they had chemical reactions going on. By looking at the chemistry of the micrometrites, we can say something about what the chemistry of the atmosphere is like. It relates to this idea of how the Earth’s atmosphere has changed and how it remained habitable over time.”
The application is this: micrometrites from four billion years ago, around the time the first microbes appeared in the fossil record, the Earth had a stronger presence of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. In that time, the Catling says the Sun was about 30% dimmer, so he theorizes that planets around smaller stars could support life with a similar composition in the atmosphere. It’s one example of the expanding understanding of what is needed to support life.
“You can have different atmospheres that increase the habitability of different planets, even if they’re not exactly all the same distance as Earth is from the Sun.”
That research, combined with the James Webb Telescope have led to the discovery of more than 5,000 exoplanets that are the right distance from a star to support life.
“If you extrapolate to our galaxy, the Milky Way, then we would estimate that evert start has at least one planet around it and probably most of them have many planets around them.” Catling said, “It now means that there are literally billions of planets in our galaxy in the right place around their starts where they could have liquid water on the surface.”
The search for life may not even mean leaving the Solar System. Recent NASA missions have sent spacecraft to observe the icy moons a few planets away, like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus.
In order to find out, Dale Winebrunner, Ph.D and Justin Burnett have worked to create an electrical ice probe that melts ice to drill to the bottom. They hope to test it on the Eastern Ice Shelves of Antarctica, where melted lakes and rivers have been detected three kilometers under the surface.
“Wherever we look under the ice sheet, there is a surprising diversity of microbes making a living, so to speak, utilizing chemistries that are quite diverse,” Winebrunner said.
Burnett has used probes on test runs in Greenland. He was part of a team in West Antarctica that used a hot-water drill to find life about a mile under the icy surface.
“It’s the first time it had ever been done,” Burnett said, “to see in real time the results and the microbiome that existed down there that was only theorized, you know, moments [before that].”
If life can be found under Ice that has permeated for 35 million years, it’s worth looking to see if it has arisen in other places, Winebrunner said.
“If we ask how plentiful life is in the universe and where it may occur, are we alone or not? If life arose twice in the same solar system, independently, that tells us something really important about how life arises in the universe,” Winebrunner said.
It could mean that life is more common than previously thought.
“It’s quite easy, in fact, in many ways, to make the building blocks of life. Going from that to then a functioning organism, that’s the gap in knowledge that we don’t yet have an answer to.” Catling said, " The technology is going to come online. In theory, if life is out there, we should be able find it."
Catling points out that the James Webb Telescope was never built with the intention of finding exoplanets; it just turned out to be very effective in doing so.
In the 2040’s, another telescope is scheduled to be launched, built with the purpose of finding signs of life throughout the universe.
“Maybe it’s not just some miracle on Earth, but there’s a process, a chemical process that naturally leads to life.”
“A lot of people in the astrobiology community in the United States and beyond say that within a generation, if life is out there, we should find it,” Catling said.
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