Inventing Tools for Detecting Life Elsewhere | Caltech
http://www.caltech.edu/news/inventing-tools-detecting-life-elsewhere-54515
Caltech astronomers develop new strategy for future telescopes
Recently, astronomers announced the discovery that a star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven Earth-size planets.
Three of the planets reside in the "habitable zone," the region around a star where liquid water is most likely to
exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Other potentially habitable worlds have also been discovered in recent years,
leaving many people wondering: How do we find out if these planets actually host life?
At Caltech, in the Exoplanet Technology Laboratory, or ET Lab, of Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet,
researchers have been busy developing a new strategy for scanning exoplanets for biosignatures—signs of life such
as oxygen molecules and methane. These chemicals—which don't naturally stick around for long because they bind with
other chemicals—are abundant on Earth largely thanks to the living creatures that expel them. Finding both of these
chemicals around another planet would be a strong indicator of the presence of life.
