Exoplanets

Life on Other Planets? Don’t Make me Laugh

Seriously, new work suggests that laughing gas could point to alien life elsewhere in the universe

Artist’s impression of TRAPPIST-1e planet, as of 2018. Image credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech — Cropped from: PIA22093: TRAPPIST-1 Planet Lineup — Updated Feb. 2018, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76364487

Researchers in the United States at the University of California, Riverside, have completed a study which suggests that nitrous oxide (remember the dentist?) could be an indicator of carbon-based life on a planet.

The paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal suggests that

…nitrous oxide (N2O) — a product of ‘microbial nitrogen metabolism’ — is a compelling exoplanet biosignature gas with distinctive spectral features in the near- and mid-infrared, and only minor abiotic sources on Earth.

So, it may be possible to spot N2O in spectral analysis of light which has passed through the atmosphere of other planets.

Or, in their words:

Here we use a global biogeochemical model coupled with photochemical and spectral models to systematically quantify the limits of plausible N2O abundances and spectral detectability for Earth analogs orbiting main-sequence (FGKM) stars

With 5,235 exoplanets already catalogued by NASA (3 January 2023), there’s plenty of scope for research.