Question: Are we any closer to finding life on another planet ?

Rosanna Tilbrook answered on 5 Mar 2019: last edited 14 Mar 2019 10:52 am

It’s hard to say- finding life on other planets is pretty difficult! We’ve come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of decades though, especially with exoplanet science (planets outside our own Solar System). One of my lecturers guessed we’re 20 years away; I think 20-50 years is fairy realistic, but there’s a lot of work to be done.
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As for life on other planets in our own Solar System, we’re looking at Mars. Mars doesn’t have any obvious life on it today, but we think it had huge oceans of water in the past, much like Earth does now. Astrobiologists (people who study space biology) think water is an essential component of life, so Mars may have had life at some point in it’s history- it might even have some now, but we think these would be microbes living underground, so it’s really hard to find out. There’s a mission to Mars launching next year where a rover will drill down into the surface of Mars to learn more about this (look up the Mars 2020 mission)! We’re also really excited about a few of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn- we know they have huge oceans of water underneath their surfaces- there’s just a small matter of getting through the 20km of ice above them!
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On planets outside our Solar System, things are also tricky. We’d be looking for super obvious signs of life- an atmosphere containing oxygen is one of these indicators. Oxygen should disappear from atmospheres in a few thousand years when left alone, so if you see oxygen in a planetary atmosphere it means something is replacing it. The main producers of oxygen on Earth are plants, a.k.a. life! However, it’s really hard to look at the atmospheres of planets that are millions of miles away, but in a few years time a new powerful telescope is launching (the James Webb Space Telescope) which will help us with this.