Hugh Bollinger / Sunday, April 3, 2011

We'll never get tired of looking

By Reilly Capps The universe is mostly space. Except where it's dotted with some stuff that's either stars or asteroids or dust. And average folks are (sort of) interested in the space and in the stuff. But all we really, deeply care about is life. Why else would nearly every big news article about space focus on how it might allow us to better understand the origins of Earthly life? Or, if it's not about that, it's about the ultimate fate of Earth, allowing us to plan the big going-away party that's going to happen in about five billion years. Or, if it's not about that, it's about the likelihood that the discovery will allow us to find life on other planets. No other question has quite the same potential to change the way we view ourselves. If we find life, we will not be the universe's only children. We will have brothers across the universe, and we will go on Oprah and cry and gush and regret all the time we lost. And so we fund research. NASA just named the 2011 Carl Sagan fellows, all dedicated to the question "Are there Earth-like planets orbiting other stars?" But we appear to be getting better at looking for it. An astronomist at the University of Seattle suggests looking for Earth-like planets in a new place: not just orbiting stars that spit fire like our Sun, but around little white dwarfs. Why look there? Chiefly, because planets are easier to spot there. See, we never directly see planets outside our own solar system (we call them exoplanets). We infer their existence by proxy, because we can glimpse a very slight dimming when the planet passes between the distant star and us. Since white dwarfs are small, planets passing in front of them would cause a more noticeable dim. This dimming could be seen by telescopes from Earth, whereas most planet-spotting now is done from space-based telescopes. When I first heard this idea I didn't understand how this could be possible, since white dwarfs are the lingering remnants of stars that have already been through the worst. Before becoming a white dwarf, a stable star explodes outward and becomes a red giant. By my logic, that explosion would consume any planet that was very close to it. Which are the planets we're talking about here. But further research leads me to two ideas: 1. When the star exploded into a red giant, the planet would, in fact, be scorched. But then the star will contract to a white dwarf, and it turns out that white dwarfs have extremely long lifespans, billions and billions or years. So when the star settled down to its long life as a white dwarf, the planet could, if given enough time, collect the necessary organic materials -- meteors would be one source -- and under the gentle light of the white dwarf, develop life. (However that gets sparked.) (We're still not sure.) 2. Planets full of organic matter could, after the star had gone through its red giant phase and contracted into a white dwarf, migrate into a closer orbit. Planets are realigning themselves around stars all the time as they are knocked around like billiard balls by other stray balls of matter. All of this is very exciting, but it's not ultimately enough. We want to find more possibilities for life. So some clever guys at the Fermi lab postulate that planets might not even need light at all to have liquid water, the main ingredient for life on Earth. Collisions between different dark matter particles could be enough. This is either a brilliant idea or totally insane. But what we want to find is life. A world swarming and suffocating with life (our current situation). Life creating life. Life piled on life. If we find a world with life, people will see it as a second home for us to escape to, once we've finished burning down this one for the insurance money. (The optimistic pessimist view.) Or people will realize these planets are too distant to commute to, and be motivated to care for Earth while finding comfort in the fact that we are not alone. (The pessimistic optimist view.) The ancient field of popularizing science has always lured potential converts with the promise that science will solve the deeper mysteries. Pythagoras had no sooner explained the ratios of the three sides of a triangle than he was proclaiming that the meaning of life can be found by fiddling around with numbers. And now that we have solved many/most of the major-MAJOR-MAJOR mysteries that have vexed us primates -- we know why the sky is blue and how old the universe is -- the biggest most intriguing question in the minds of the average woman is: are we alone? Is there life out there? An editor at Scientific American says, "Astronomers are probably just a few years from the first-ever finding of an Earth twin outside our solar system." Even after we find it, we are many years from figuring out if it has life. We may never find life. But we'll never get tired of looking.

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