Is there any recent discoveries in exoplanet research revealed about the potential for life beyond Earth?
In: Planetary Science
Aside from mars, since we know quite a few things about it.
It depends on what you mean by recent. But we now have results of a number of exoplanet discovery searches. We have found a number of planets in the “goldilock” zone and even nicely sized rocky planets. So Earth is not the only one out there. But more importantly these studies did not try to specifically search out these types of planets. Instead we have been looking for larger planets and planets further from their star as these are easier to see. And these searches have been mostly focused at a small number of stars. The reason for this is that we can map the numbers, sizes and orbits of planets in typical planetary systems and then extrapolate from this. So even though we have only found a couple of “perfect” planets we can see from the data that the reason we can not find more is because our instruments are not able to detect them. We find lots of planets that are bigger then the Earth and lots of planets that are further from their star then the Earth and we know our instruments could not detect smaller or closer planets then those we do see. From this data we can see that most stars have planets around them and a lot of them should be in the same size and orbit as the Earth. Early research estimated that there were maybe 100 planets in the galaxy which could support life, but in reality there are millions of them.
The most promising recent finding has been from the James Webb. There’s a planet called K2 – 18b that’s shown potential but like it should be, more work needs to be done to confirm or deny what could be the greatest discovery mankind has ever made.
There is no recent discovery or paper that reveals more potential than let’s say last year.
We’ve known for a while now that organic chemistry occurs in the universe without living things. Nucleotides, the monomers of DNA and RNA are produced naturally without living cells. Amino acids also form naturally and have been found on asteroids and comets.
There was a recent trace molecule discovered in the atmosphere of a planet. Dimethyl sulfide was the compound. We don’t know of a non-biological pathway this substance can be made. Bacteria make it on our planet. The signal was weak as part of the data however. More analysis of the spectral data will be needed to determine if this molecule is actually present in the atmosphere. These biosignatures also don’t tell us for sure if life is present, just that a molecule exists, we would need to consider all of the multiple points of evidence to make determinations about life on these planets.
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