New Earth

Source: National Geographic
Throughout history, only one Earth has been known to exist in the universe. Soon there may be another. And another. And another.

It took humans thousands of years to explore our own planet and centuries to comprehend our neighboring planets, but nowadays new worlds are being discovered every week. To date, astronomers have identified more than 370 “exoplanets,” worlds orbiting stars other than the sun. Many are so strange as to confirm the biologist J. B. S. Haldane’s famous remark that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” There’s an Icarus-like “hot Saturn” 260 light-years from Earth, whirling around its parent star so rapidly that a year there lasts less than three days. Circling another star 150 light-years out is a scorched “hot Jupiter,” whose upper atmosphere is being blasted off to form a gigantic, comet-like tail. Three benighted planets have been found orbiting a pulsar—the remains of a once mighty star shrunk into a spinning atomic nucleus the size of a city—while untold numbers of worlds have evidently fallen into their suns or been flung out of their systems to become “floaters” that wander in eternal darkness.

Amid such exotica, scientists are eager for a hint of the familiar: planets resembling Earth, orbiting their stars at just the right distance—neither too hot nor too cold—to support life as we know it. No planets quite like our own have yet been found, presumably because they're inconspicuous. To see a planet as small and dim as ours amid the glare of its star is like trying to see a firefly in a fireworks display; to detect its gravitational influence on the star is like listening for a cricket in a tornado. Yet by pushing technology to the limits, astronomers are rapidly approaching the day when they can find another Earth and interrogate it for signs of life.

Only 11 exoplanets, all of them big and bright and conveniently far away from their stars, have as yet had their pictures taken. Most of the others have been detected by using the spectroscopic Doppler technique, in which starlight is analyzed for evidence that the star is being tugged ever so slightly back and forth by the gravitational pull of its planets. In recent years astronomers have refined the Doppler technique so exquisitely that they can now tell when a star is pulled from its appointed rounds by only one meter a second—about human walking speed. That's sufficient to detect a giant planet in a big orbit, or a small one if it's very close to its star, but not an Earth at anything like our Earth's 93-million-mile distance from its star. The Earth tugs the sun around at only one-tenth walking speed, or about the rate that an infant can crawl; astronomers cannot yet prize out so tiny a signal from the light of a distant star.

Another approach is to watch a star for the slight periodic dip in its brightness that will occur should an orbiting planet circle in front of it and block a fraction of its light. At most a tenth of all planetary systems are likely to be oriented so that these mini-eclipses, called transits, are visible from Earth, which means that astronomers may have to monitor many stars patiently to capture just a few transits. The French COROT satellite, now in the third and final year of its prime mission, has discovered seven transiting exoplanets, one of which is only 70 percent larger than Earth.

The United States' Kepler satellite is COROT's more ambitious successor. Launched from Cape Canaveral last March, Kep ler is essentially just a big digital camera with a .95-meter aperture and a 95-megapixel detector. It makes wide-field pictures every 30 minutes, capturing the light of more than 100,000 stars in a single patch of sky between the bright stars Deneb and Vega. Computers on Earth monitor the brightness of all those stars over time, alerting humans when they detect the slight dimming that could signal the transit of a planet.

Because that dimming can be mimicked by other phenomena, such as the pulsations of a variable star or a large sunspot moving across a star's surface, the Kepler scientists won't announce the presence of a planet until they have seen it transit at least three times—a wait that may be only a few days or weeks for a planet rapidly circling close to its star but years for a terrestrial twin. By combining Kepler results with Doppler observations, astronomers expect to determine the diameters and masses of transiting planets. If they manage to discover a rocky planet roughly the size of Earth orbiting in the habitable zone—not so close to the star that the planet's water has been baked away, nor so far out that it has frozen into ice—they will have found what biologists believe could be a promising abode for life.

The best hunting grounds may be dwarf stars, smaller than the sun. Such stars are plentiful (seven of the ten stars nearest to Earth are M dwarfs), and they enjoy long, stable careers, providing a steady supply of sunlight to any life-bearing planets that might occupy their habitable zones. Most important for planet hunters, the dimmer the star, the closer in its habitable zone lies—dim dwarf stars are like small campfires, where campers must sit close to be comfortable—so transit observations will pay off more quickly. A close-in planet also exerts a stronger pull on its star, making its presence easier to confirm with the Doppler method. Indeed, the most promising planet yet found—the "super Earth" Gliese 581 d, seven times Earth's mass—orbits in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only a third the mass of the sun.

Should Earthlike planets be found within the habitable zones of other stars, a dedicated space telescope designed to look for signs of life there might one day take a spectrum of the light coming from each planet and examine it for possible biosignatures such as atmospheric methane, ozone, and oxygen, or for the "red edge" produced when chlorophyll-containing photosynthetic plants reflect red light. Directly detecting and analyzing the planet's own light, which might be one ten-billionth as bright as the star's, would be a tall order. But when a planet transits, starlight shining through the atmosphere could reveal clues to its composition that a space telescope might be able to detect.

While grappling with the daunting technological challenge of performing a chemical analysis of planets they cannot even see, scientists searching for extraterrestrial life must keep in mind that it may be very different from life here at home. The lack of the red edge, for instance, might not mean a terrestrial exoplanet is lifeless: Life thrived on Earth for billions of years before land plants appeared and populated the continents. Biological evolution is so inherently unpredictable that even if life originated on a planet identical to Earth at the same time it did here, life on that planet today would almost certainly be very different from terrestrial life.

As the biologist Jacques Monod once put it, life evolves not only through necessity—the universal workings of natural law—but also through chance, the unpredictable intervention of countless accidents. Chance has reared its head many times in our planet's history, dramatically so in the many mass extinctions that wiped out millions of species and, in doing so, created room for new life-forms to evolve. Some of these baleful accidents appear to have been caused by comets or asteroids colliding with Earth—most recently the impact, 65 million years ago, that killed off the dinosaurs and opened up opportunities for the distant ancestors of human beings. Therefore scientists look not just for exoplanets identical to the modern Earth, but for planets resembling the Earth as it used to be or might have been. "The modern Earth may be the worst template we could use in searching for life elsewhere," notes Caleb Scharf, head of Columbia University's Astrobiology Center.

It was not easy for earlier explorers to plumb the depths of the oceans, map the far side of the moon, or discern evidence of oceans beneath the frozen surfaces of Jovian moons, and it will not be easy to find life on the planets of other stars. But we now have reason to believe that billions of such planets must exist and that they hold the promise of expanding not only the scope of human knowledge but also the richness of the human imagination.

For thousands of years we humans knew so little about the universe that we were apt to cele­brate our imaginations and denigrate reality. (As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, the mysticism of the religious visionaries of old arose from an "intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality.") Now, with advances in science, it has become gallingly evident that nature's creativity outstrips our own. The curtain is going up on countless new worlds with stories to tell.