If aliens modified a planet in their solar system to make it warmer, we'd be able to tell. A new study identifies the artificial greenhouse gases that would be giveaways of a terraformed planet.
If aliens modified a planet in their solar system to make it warmer, we'd be able to tell. A new study identifies the artificial greenhouse gases that would be giveaways of a terraformed planet.
"For us, these gases are bad because we don't want to increase warming. But they'd be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars," said UCR astrobiologist and lead study author Edward Schwieterman.
Others have proposed refrigerant chemicals, like CFCs, as technosignature gases because they are almost exclusively artificial and visible in Earth's atmosphere. However, CFCs may not be advantageous because they destroy the ozone layer, unlike the fully fluorinated gases discussed in the new paper, which are chemically inert.
The group also considered the European LIFE mission's ability to detect the fluorinated gases. The LIFE mission would be able to directly image planets using infrared light, allowing it to target more exoplanets than the Webb telescope, which looks at planets as they pass in front of their stars.
Space Telescopes Astronomy NASA Space Exploration Satellites Pluto Solar System
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