Kepler 22b: Are there interesting aliens 600 light years away

The excitingly named Kepler 22b, a planet believed to have been discovered orbiting a star a mere 600 light years away, is being hailed as a “New Earth”. But sci-fi fans shouldn’t get too excited just yet: as always with these stories, the likelihood is that we have not met the neighbours. Or, if we have, they probably aren’t very exciting conversationalists.

Talking about the likelihood of intelligent life on Kepler 22b, Dr Lewis Dartnell, of the Centre for Planetary Sciences at UCL, said, “There are big hurdles that life has to get over, and we don’t know how big a hurdle the origin of life itself is. You simply can’t tell with a single datum – you can’t do stats when N=1.”

The N that Dr Dartnell mentioned was earth: the only known planet inhabiting intelligent life forms, or better still, life forms of any kind.

Dr Dartnell further adds, “The interesting thing will be when we go to Mars and Europa and see whether there are bacteria there. It would be enormously significant if life is found there. But the next step, once Kepler has looked at a lot of planets, will be to see what their atmospheres are made of, using infrared spectroscopy.

“If one or two of them have oxygen in the atmosphere, it may be a transient thing – like Venus, undergoing a runaway greenhouse effect – but if we find, say, 20 Earth-like planets, all with the signature of oxygen in their atmosphere, then that would be very unlikely. Life would be the more reasonable explanation,” concluded Dr Dartnell.

The most basic of fungi is made of eukaryotic cells – those having a nucleus. However, scientists are not even sure about the existence of a prokaryotic cell (cells without even a nucleus to give it a vague sense of personality) on the planet.

In his book ‘Life Ascending’, Nick Lane mentioned that the “the mind-boggling complexity of the eukaryotic cell” is not easy to achieve. He stressed on it being a freak occurrence combined two genomes about two billion years ago, and was, to put it mildly, not all that likely. He said, “The eukaryotic cell only evolved once because the union of two prokaryotes, in which one gains entry to the other, is truly a rare event, a genuinely fateful encounter.

Glimpsed in 2009, Kepler-22b is the first the U.S. space agency has been able to confirm, though French astronomers had confirmed it to meet key requirements for sustaining life earlier this year.

Till date scientists have just made sure that the planet is at the right distance from its sun and boasts suitable temperature, but they have had no further confirmation about any certain live presence. They just know that this is a good place where life can exist. Whether it does or not, they do not know.

Bill Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center, said, “We have now got good planet confirmation with Kepler-22b. We are certain that it is in the habitable zone and if it has a surface, it ought to have a nice temperature.”

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Posted by admin on December 9, 2011. Filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry