MessageToEagle.com -
In the search for life elsewhere, many studies focus on finding liquid water. But what if life could exist with some other solvent? Saturn's
smoggy moon Titan makes scientists question the possibilities for methane-based life in the galaxy.
The search for life is largely limited to the search for water – we look for exoplanets at the correct distance from their stars for
liquid water to splash and flow freely on their surfaces, we ‘follow the water’ on the red planet Mars, and SETI scans radio frequencies in the
‘water hole’ between the 1,420MHz emission line of neutral hydrogen and the 1,666MHz hydroxyl line.
There are two very good reasons why our attention is so strongly focused on water.
First, it’s an efficient solvent for biological chemistry, allowing molecules to move around in cells, and has properties that are friendly to life – a
high heat capacity, the ability to remain in liquid form across a wide temperature range, and a molecular density that forces molecules to organize themselves,
rather than the water organizing around the molecules. Secondly, the biosignatures of a water-based chemistry are a lot easier for us to identify remotely.
Moreover, the most important fact about water’s relationship with life is that it is here on Earth.
“Some argue that is the only important thing about water,” says Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center. McKay is an astrobiologist and planetary
scientist who specializes in hunting down alien environments and then asking the question, ‘could something live here?’, rather than deciding what is and isn’t
habitable beforehand.
“We live on a planet where water is a liquid and we have adapted and evolved to work with that liquid,” he says.
“Life has very cleverly used the properties of water to do things not just in terms of solution, but in using the strong polarity of that
solution to its advantage in terms of hydrophobic and hydrophilic bonds, and using the very structure of water to help align molecules.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has found the organic molecule methane on the extrasolar planet HD 189733b.
Suppose, though, that life needn’t be constrained to a water-based chemistry; would we be able to recognize the signatures of such life and the
habitats in which it lives? From one perspective, water seems such a good match for life because it may be the only match – no other liquid has
the properties or abundance that water has. On the other hand there is another point of view that says there is more to the story, and that life
simply works with whatever materials it has at hand. On Earth, that material is water, but on other planets it may be something else.
Already we have discovered another world, in our Solar System, where rivers and lakes are made with a quite different liquid.
Titan’s Liquid for Life?
One point four billion kilometers from the Sun orbits Saturn, the majestic ringed planet.
Saturn is a gaseous world with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and no discernible rocky surface below. However,
among its retinue of icy moons is Titan, bigger than the planet Mercury and swathed in a dense cloak of hydrocarbon smog suspended in its nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
It’s the only moon in the Solar System to have an atmosphere, and it has intrigued astronomers ever since Gerard Kuiper detected methane there in 1944.
Sunlight glints off a methane lake at near Titan’s north pole in this five-micron infrared image taken by the Cassini spacecraft. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/DLR
When the joint NASA–ESA Cassini–Huygens mission arrived in the Saturnian system in 2004, the truth about Titan was revealed.
Infrared cameras and radar on Cassini showed a world riven by black, oily rivers and lakes, whilst the Huygens probe plunged
through the opaque atmosphere to land on a soggy floodplain, but not one damp with water. On Titan, where the temperature is
just 94 degrees above absolute zero (–179 degrees Celsius) water is as solid as rock and liquid methane runs through the river valleys and into the high latitude polar lakes. Instead of a water cycle, Titan has a methane cycle, and a complex molecular soup formed from reactions in the upper atmosphere between ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and methane.
Suppose life could exist in an environment like this; it would be a whole new category of habitable planet, one where liquid
methane replaces liquid water, consequently leading to an entirely different habitable zone, one that is farther out from a
star than the liquid water zone.
McKay is already ahead of the game. Along with Ashley Gilliam of NASA Ames and the University of California, Santa Cruz,
he published a paper in the journal Planetary and Space Science in April that describes where a world with temperatures suitable for
liquid methane could be found around a red dwarf star.
Methane Worlds
Red dwarfs – also called M-dwarfs after of their classification on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram – are stars that are smaller and
cooler than our Sun, and therefore the planetary systems around them are scaled down accordingly. McKay and Gilliam calculate that a
planet would have a surface temperature of –179 degrees Celsius in a zone between 0.63 and 1.66 astronomical units (99 million and 248
million kilometers around the star Gliese 581, an M3-type red dwarf located 20.5 light years away. Four planets have already been
confirmed orbiting Gliese 581, but none within the ‘liquid methane habitable zone’. Two more planets have been claimed to exist in
the system, and one of these would fall within the zone, at 0.76 astronomical units, but evidence for the existence of this world has proven highly controversial. Alternatively, the liquid methane habitable zone around a cooler M4 type red dwarf would be even closer in, between 0.084 astronomical units and 0.23 astronomical units (12.6 million kilometers to 34.4 million kilometers.
Cold, methane-dominated worlds could easily exist around Sun-like stars, and Titan is proof of that. But there are advantages to
finding these worlds around red dwarfs instead. First, their small orbital radii make them easier to detect, whether by transits or
via radial velocity Doppler shifts. Second, Titan’s atmosphere is opaque to blue and ultraviolet light, but transparent to red and
infrared light, and red dwarfs produce more of the latter than the former.
If Titan orbited a red dwarf, more red light would seep
through to its surface, warming the planet and extending the range of the liquid methane habitable zone. (Interestingly, a red giant,
which is close to the endpoint in the life cycle of a Sun-like star, produces light of similar red wavelengths.
When our Sun expands
into a bloated red giant in about five billion years, engulfing all the planets up to Earth and possibly Mars, Titan may well reap the benefits –
for a short while at least before the red giant puffs away to leave behind a white dwarf star.)
Red dwarfs are also often highly magnetically active, and experience large stellar flares that emit powerful bursts of ultraviolet
radiation. While these flares should not irreversibly damage exoplanet atmospheres, according to research led by Antigona Segura of Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, they could have a different kind of impact on Titan-esque atmospheres, disassociating molecules to create a haze like we see shrouding
Saturn’s largest moon. The more active the red dwarf, the more hazy the atmosphere of a Titan-like planet becomes, and the thicker the haze, the colder the surface
and the closer to the star the liquid methane habitable zone has to be.
Greater or lesser haze also would alter the outward appearance of such a world, and if we are to one day hunt for habitable planets in
the liquid methane habitable zone, we’ll need to know what they will look like, as well as what biosignatures to search for.
It is here that the main stumbling block lies.
“We just don’t know what the tell-tale signs for life would be in such an atmosphere because it is so vastly different from ours,” says
Lisa Kaltenegger, who conducts research into habitable exoplanets at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
“That said, it will change in a flash if Chris [McKay] finds life on Titan and can tell us what it produces and what we could look for remotely with a telescope.”
Proof of Life
However, McKay already has a few suggestions and, tantalizingly, there may even be supporting evidence from Titan.
In 2005 he published a paper with Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, building on work by
Steven Benner of the University of Florida, describing how methane-based life forms on Titan (‘methanogens’) could consume
hydrogen, acetylene and ethane, and exhale methane instead of carbon-dioxide. If such a life form existed, it could reveal itself through a depletion of hydrogen, acetylene and ethane at the surface.
Amazingly, this is what studies of this moon have actually shown, but McKay himself is dubious that these measurements
necessarily mean there is life on Titan. Rather, he points to other, more likely explanations including mistakes in the
modeling of Titan’s atmosphere upon which these measurements are partially derived, to unknown physical processes occurring on
Titan that are not related to life. In regards to using this formula to search for life elsewhere, the depletion of hydrogen, acetylene and ethane on the surface of a hazy planet are not conducive to remote spectroscopic imaging from many light years away.
“It’s not clear that we would be able to see the depletion of hydrogen over interstellar distances,” says McKay.
“On Earth, of course, the big biosignature that is visible over interstellar distances is the build-up of oxygen, but even that
is not an unambiguous indicator for life, because for most of Earth’s history there has been life but no build-up of oxygen.”
An artist’s impression of the Gliese 581 system of planets orbiting a red dwarf. Credit: ESO
Nevertheless, Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona has speculated that there are many more exo-Titans than exo-Earths out there.
If Chris McKay is right about methane-based life, such habitats could vastly outnumber planets with water-based life. The trouble is, the
cold temperatures in which liquid methane exists would result in life forms with very slow metabolisms. Life would be sluggish. Is there any way
it could be warmed up?
“You would have to invoke a lot of pressure to keep methane liquid at warmer temperatures,” says Kaltenegger. “And if you think about it,
water and carbon are extremely abundant. So if you make the planet warmer, you are much more likely to get carbon dioxide than methane, and
methane would go out of its liquid phase so you wouldn’t have the triple point [where for a given temperature and pressure a material can exist
as a liquid, solid or gas] like the triple point of water on Earth.”
Other Solutions
If warm liquid methane is out of the question, what other potential substitutes for water are there?
Hydrogen fluoride comes close to the properties of liquid water, but fluoride is relatively rare in the Universe and so is unlikely to play a major factor in life.
More common is salt: if temperatures are hot enough, salts will become liquid.
“I can imagine a world where there is sodium chloride liquid and salt is somehow the basis for life,” says McKay,
but he admits it is speculative. Rather than spending too much time on outlandish ideas, he believes it’s better to search for the environments first,
and then ask, can anything live there?
Comparison of the habitable zone in the Solar System and the habitable zone around Gliese 581. Because Gliese 581 is a cooler red dwarf, its
liquid water habitable zone is closer in, while its liquid methane habitable zone would be between 0.63 and 1.66 astronomical units. Credit: ESO
Lisa Kaltenegger shares the same philosophy. “First we have to figure out using models what it takes for a planet to be habitable, and then we look
at the data that comes in about such worlds and see how far we can stretch the habitable definition.”
Yet of the nearly 700 confirmed exoplanets so far (not counting all the unconfirmed candidate worlds detected by NASA’s Kepler mission) only two are
potentially suitable for liquid water, and that’s only on the condition that circumstances on the planets themselves are perfect. As for liquid methane,
without some hard data on the properties of methane-based life, astronomers are going to err on the side of caution. Even McKay still favors searching
for water-based life and habitats.
“We know water works, it’s something that we understand,” he says. “Although I argue that we should consider liquid methane, we don’t know that it
works. In that sense we’re still guessing.”
We may be kept guessing until the next mission to Titan, which may not happen until the 2030s. Just as Earth is the template for water-based habitats,
Titan is the template for methane-based habitats. However, unless life can be shown to exist there, liquid methane habitable zones will always be passed
over in favor of watery zones. Unfortunately, we may be missing a huge chunk of life in the process.
Unusual Star Discovered In The Lupus Constellation
For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy.
Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, exploding stars, binary stars; by now, you might suppose that every kind of star in the Milky Way had been seen.
That's why a recent discovery is so surprising.
Black Plants Could Exist On Alien Worlds With Two Suns
We have previously seen what auroras might like on alien worlds.
This time we examine how life on planets in binary star systems can evolve.
Earth-like planets with two or three suns would have multiple sources of light that could be used for photosynthesis.
This means plants on such worlds could be dark, even completely black.
Abnormal Star Discovered In The 'Forbidden Zone'
A team of astrophysicists from Germany, France and Italy have discovered in the constellation Leo is an old star.
The star's existence raised at once many questions for scientists.
The object is definitely not as its "contemporaries" that appeared immediately after the Big Bang event.
Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, the discovery of a single variable star in 1923 altered the
course of modern astronomy. And, at least one famous astronomer of the time lamented that the discovery had shattered his world view.
Bright Star In The Constellation Lyra Is Cooler Than The Human Body
The coldest class of stars have temperatures as cool as the human body.
Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success.
When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see.
Extraterrestrial Interstellar Beacon - A Broadcast From Outer Space
There could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, but not all of them can be classified as interstellar travellers.
Many civilizations might simply lack sufficient technology to travel among the stars. Nevertheless,
just like humans other intelligent alien species could seek contact with their galactic neighbors.
Have we already detected such alien signals without being able to identify their true nature?
Hidden Misshapen Celestial "Wonder"
It is one of the brightest and strangest objects in the Milky Way - the corpse of a star that exploded around 1000 years ago.
Only a handful of such young supernova remnants are known.
The object named G350.1-0.3 is also incredibly small (only eight light years across) and young in astronomical terms.
Giant Ice Planets Have More Water Than Previously Thought
A new study shows that current extimates of ice-giant planetary interiors overstate water's
compressibility by as much as 30 percent. The findings could dramatically change our understanding of the physical properties of such worlds.
Black Holes With No 'Table Manners' Eat Two Courses At Once!
It is still unknown how the supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galaxy centres accrete gas and grow.
Researchers from the University of Leicester (UK) and Monash University in Australia have investigated how some black holes got so big so fast that they are billions of times heavier than the sun.
Mercury Surprises Scientists
On March 17, MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) completed its one-year primary mission, orbiting Mercury, capturing nearly 100,000 images, and recording data
that reveals new information about the planet's core, topography, and the mysterious radar bright material in the permanently shadowed areas near the poles.
Living Earth Simulator - Supercomputer Predicting The Future
In Douglas Adams book the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we encounter a machine called Deep Thought. It is the most powerful computer ever built. Deep Thought is capable of answering questions
concerning life, the Universe, and simply everything. Now scientists are planning to create a similar machine. It is called the Living Earth Simulator (LES).
Warp-Speed Planets Are Some Of The Fastest Objects In The Milky Way
Warped planets are some of the fastest objects in the Milky Way and they zoom through space near the speed of light.
Some years ago astronomers were astonished when they they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.
The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets?
Big Bang On Earth: Make Room For The World's Largest Telescope
Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world's largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade.
Alien Species Living In The Inner Milky Way Could Be In Danger
Few people doubt there is intelligent alien life in the Milky Way galaxy, but where can we expect to find it?
Astronomers think that while the inner sector of the MIlky Way Galaxy may be the most likely to support habitable worlds.
Unfortunately some of these places are also most dangerous to all life-forms.
Thermonuclear Burning In A Neutron Star Detected For The First Time!
It's a very important discovery!
For the first time, an international team of scientists have detected all phases of thermonuclear burning in a
neutron star, located close to the center of the galaxy in the globular cluster Terzan 5.
Astronomical Mystery - Tremendous Explosion And Appearance Of Odd Rings
Twenty five years ago, on 1987 February 23, the brightest supernova of modern times was observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The collision occurred at speeds near 60 million kilometers per hour and shock-heats the ring material causing it to glow.
Over time, astronomers have watched and waited for the expanding debris from this tremendous stellar explosion to crash into previously expelled material...
Giant Jupiter - Our "Would-Be" Friend With Secrets From The Past
It knocked a giant planet into deep space, swallowed up a smaller rival before it could grow any bigger.
Careful observers saw dark spots rapidly changing places and almost a century ago, a luminous protuberance on the eastern edge of Jupiter,
on the equatorial side of the north equatorial belt was reported.
MessageToEagle.com -
In the search for life elsewhere, many studies focus on finding liquid water. But what if life could exist with some other solvent? Saturn's
smoggy moon Titan makes scientists question the possibilities for methane-based life in the galaxy.
A new, one of its kind study conducted by scienstists
reveals what many have long considered to be plausible, namely that life originated in outer space.
We have previously seen that
For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy.
Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, exploding stars, binary stars; by now, you might suppose that every kind of star in the Milky Way had been seen.
That's why a recent discovery is so surprising.
We have previously seen what 
A team of astrophysicists from Germany, France and Italy have discovered in the constellation Leo is an old star.
The star's existence raised at once many questions for scientists.
The object is definitely not as its "contemporaries" that appeared immediately after the Big Bang event.
Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, the discovery of a single variable star in 1923 altered the
course of modern astronomy. And, at least one famous astronomer of the time lamented that the discovery had shattered his world view.
The coldest class of stars have temperatures as cool as the human body.
Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success.
When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see.
There could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, but not all of them can be classified as interstellar travellers.
Many civilizations might simply lack sufficient technology to travel among the stars. Nevertheless,
just like humans other intelligent alien species could seek contact with their galactic neighbors.
Have we already detected such alien signals without being able to identify their true nature?
It is one of the brightest and strangest objects in the Milky Way - the corpse of a star that exploded around 1000 years ago.
Only a handful of such young supernova remnants are known.
The object named G350.1-0.3 is also incredibly small (only eight light years across) and young in astronomical terms.
A new study shows that current extimates of ice-giant planetary interiors overstate water's
compressibility by as much as 30 percent. The findings could dramatically change our understanding of the physical properties of such worlds.
It is still unknown how the supermassive black holes (SMBH) in galaxy centres accrete gas and grow.
Researchers from the University of Leicester (UK) and Monash University in Australia have investigated how some black holes got so big so fast that they are billions of times heavier than the sun.
On March 17, MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) completed its one-year primary mission, orbiting Mercury, capturing nearly 100,000 images, and recording data
that reveals new information about the planet's core, topography, and the mysterious radar bright material in the permanently shadowed areas near the poles.
In Douglas Adams book the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we encounter a machine called Deep Thought. It is the most powerful computer ever built. Deep Thought is capable of answering questions
concerning life, the Universe, and simply everything. Now scientists are planning to create a similar machine. It is called the Living Earth Simulator (LES).
Warped planets are some of the fastest objects in the Milky Way and they zoom through space near the speed of light.
Some years ago astronomers were astonished when they they found the first runaway star flying out of our Galaxy at a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.
The discovery intrigued theorists, who wondered: If a star can get tossed outward at such an extreme velocity, could the same thing happen to planets?
Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world's largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade.
Few people doubt there is intelligent alien life in the Milky Way galaxy, but where can we expect to find it?
Astronomers think that while the inner sector of the MIlky Way Galaxy may be the most likely to support habitable worlds.
Unfortunately some of these places are also most dangerous to all life-forms.
It's a very important discovery!
For the first time, an international team of scientists have detected all phases of thermonuclear burning in a
neutron star, located close to the center of the galaxy in the globular cluster Terzan 5.
Twenty five years ago, on 1987 February 23, the brightest supernova of modern times was observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
It knocked a giant planet into deep space, swallowed up a smaller rival before it could grow any bigger.