Life out there?
Professor Malcolm Coe showing President Pam where to start looking for extraterrestrial life!
Professor Coe, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Southampton University, explained that he saw his work as “a cultural activity” - to understand the universe in the same way that archaeologists try to explain history. There are various disciplines involved in searching for life elsewhere, but the only example anyone has found so far is on this planet.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a project that has been going for some 40 years, listening for signals from nearby systems. We are constantly transmitting signals such as radio, TV and even mobile phones, that go out into the universe and could be detected by anyone out there (picking up Eastenders broadcasts for instance). Despite surveying about 1000 of the nearest stars, they have yet to ‘hear’ anything. However, a recently built array of telescopes will allow us to ‘listen’ to many stars at once, rather than singly.
When asked about the biggest leap forward in Astronomy, Professor Coe cited the development in 1995 of a method to find planets, by looking for the ‘wobble’ they cause in their star. We have now found about 300 planets, and he is confident that we will soon discover one with very similar conditions to Earth, which might foster life. There is a doughnut shaped ‘Goldilocks zone’ around each star, where a planet is not too hot (close up), and not too cold (far away), but just right. In our own solar system Mars is an exciting possibility for finding life, that sits in the zone with Earth. It has ice/snow in some places, but no liquid water on the surface as it would just evaporate - but who knows what might be underground!
Probability tells us that even if the chances are very slim that there are the right conditions for life as we know it on another planet, there are so many out there (associated with each of 100,000 million stars in our galaxy, or the 100,000 million other galaxies in the universe) it is still possible; we must keep searching.