The team’s findings appear today in Nature Astronomy. And it’s something we can get to in the next few years.” “Now we have a way to find out if there’s liquid water on another planet. “The Holy Grail in exoplanet science is to look for habitable worlds, and the presence of life, but all the features that have been talked about so far have been beyond the reach of the newest observatories,” says Julien de Wit, assistant professor of planetary sciences at MIT. The team says this new signature, of relatively depleted carbon dioxide, is the only sign of habitability that is detectable now. While scientists have proposed other signs of habitability, those features are challenging if not impossible to measure with current technologies. What’s more, this new signature is within the sights of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The researchers propose that if a terrestrial planet has substantially less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere compared to other planets in the same system, it could be a sign of liquid water - and possibly life - on that planet’s surface. Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres.
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