Laura Kreidberg: Trying to Spot the First Sign of Life Outside Earth

Laura Kriedberg, a junior
fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows and an astronomer at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is on a mission to find out life
outside Earth. More precisely, he his looking for biosignatures, tell tale
atmospheric signs of possible life on faraway extra-solar planets, or
exoplanets.
She said a planet's atmosphere
is the key to understanding how it was formed and how it evolved over billions
of years.
Astronomers are yet to find
evidence of extra-terrestrial life, but the huge presence of extrasolar planets
offers hope that there is some out there.he study of extrasolar planets is
still a relatively new field. Their existence was only visually confirmed 24
years ago (though astronomers have hypothesized their existence since the 16th
century). Today, more than 3,000 exoplanets have been discovered and close to
5,000 other bodies have been identified as candidates for life. They range from
gas giants to ice worlds to Earth-like exoplanets that sit in their solar
system’s habitable zone.
To study their atmospheres,
Kreidberg uses a method called transmission spectroscopy. During observations,
she measures the color of light that passes through a planet’s atmosphere when
it passes in front of the star it orbits. That measured light is called the
planet’s transmission spectrum. The color of light that gets absorbed by the
atoms and molecules in the planet’s atmosphere tells her about its composition.
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