(Photo : Wikimedia Commons/Lucianomendez)
Greenhouse gases in other planets or exoplanets may be an indication of alien life.
Aliens May Have Used Greenhouse Gases To Make Planets Habitable
For years, researchers have been looking for signs of life outside Earth. However, they still haven't found concrete proof of extraterrestrials.
A new study from the University of Riverside suggests that man-made gases can be an indicator of terraformed planets.
The study described gases that, with current technology, may be found in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system, even at relatively low concentrations. The James Webb Space Telescope or a future space telescope constructed by Europe could accomplish this.
Furthermore, there are reasons why such polluting gasses might be purposefully employed on an exoplanet, even if they should be limited on Earth to avoid negative impacts on the climate.
These gasses are undesirable to us since we wish to prevent global warming. However, they could be helpful to a society that wants to terraform an uninhabitable world like Mars or stop an ice age from starting.
Since there aren't many greenhouse gases in the natural world, they must be produced artificially. Finding them indicates the existence of technologically advanced intelligent living species. We refer to these signals as technosignatures.
On Earth, the five gases that the researchers suggested are employed in industry, such as the production of computer chips. These include gases made of nitrogen and fluorine or sulfur and fluorine and fluorinated forms of methane, ethane, and propane.
The fact that they are highly efficient greenhouse gasses is one benefit. Sulfur hexafluoride, for instance, has 23,500 times the heat capacity of carbon dioxide. A minuscule quantity of it has the potential to warm a frozen planet to the extent that liquid water becomes stuck on its surface.
The fact that the proposed gases are incredibly long-lived and might last up to 50,000 years in an atmosphere similar to Earth is another benefit, at least from the standpoint of hypothetical aliens. It won't be necessary to refill them too frequently to keep the weather pleasant.
Chemical refrigerants like CFCs could also be signs of sentient life. They are also evident in the Earth's atmosphere and are virtually entirely man-made. Nevertheless, in contrast to the fully fluorinated gases in the current article, which are chemically inert, CFCs destroy the ozone layer, so they might not be as advantageous.
Lastly, for fluorinated gases to influence climate, they must absorb infrared light. Space telescopes can detect the appropriate infrared signature produced by this occurrence. In certain nearby planetary systems, these compounds could be found by scientists using current or upcoming technologies.
AI-Detected Technosignatures Can Be Extraterrestrial Activities
In related news, experts led by University of Toronto student Peter Ma had previously picked up extraterrestrial signals in an area they thought was devoid of alien activity using an algorithm with artificial intelligence (AI). The discovery could be the first sign that humans have other companions in the universe.
There are three reasons why the said AI-detected technosignatures can be extraterrestrial activities.
Firstly, these were not natural phenomena, as the latter usually produced signals with a broad spectrum; instead, they were restricted bands. Second, they included an additional feature called a "slope," which suggests that the signals' origin was speeding in relation to our antennas and could not have come from Earth.
Finally, they were found in observations that were made ON-source rather than OFF-source. Because of the source's close proximity, human radio interference usually occurs in both ON- and OFF-source observations.
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