University of Washington | 2015 Oct 05
UW astronomers devise ‘habitability index’ to guide future search
[img3="The James Webb Space Telescope, a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror, is scheduled to be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in October of 2018 and will be the premier NASA observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers around the world. UW astronomers have created a “habitability index for transiting planets” to help guide the ongoing search for life beyond Earth. (Credit: NASA)"]http://www.washington.edu/news/files/20 ... t_new6.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Powerful telescopes are coming soon. Where exactly shall we point them?
Astronomers with the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have created a way to compare and rank exoplanets to help prioritize which of the thousands discovered warrant close inspection in the search for life beyond Earth.
The new metric, called the “habitability index for transiting planets,” is introduced in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal by UW astronomy professors Rory Barnes and Victoria Meadows, with research assistant and co-author Nicole Evans.
“Basically, we’ve devised a way to take all the observational data that are available and develop a prioritization scheme,” said Barnes, “so that as we move into a time when there are hundreds of targets available, we might be able to say, ‘OK, that’s the one we want to start with.'”
The Kepler Space Telescope has enabled astronomers to detect thousands of exoplanets, those beyond our solar system — far more than can be investigated one by one. The James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch in 2018, will be the first able to actually measure the atmospheric composition of a rocky, possibly Earthlike planet far off in space, and so vastly enhance the search for life.
Astronomers detect some planets when the worlds “transit” or pass in front of their host star, thus blocking some of the light. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is scheduled to launch in 2017 and will find many more worlds in this way. But it’s the Webb telescope and its “transit transmission spectroscopy” that will really be able to study planets closely to hunt for life.
But access to such telescopes is expensive and the work is methodical and time-consuming. The Virtual Planetary Laboratory’s index is a tool to help fellow astronomers decide which worlds might have the better chance of hosting life, and so are worthy of focusing limited resources on. ...
Comparative Habitability of Transiting Exoplanets - Rory Barnes, Victoria S. Meadows, Nicole Evans
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1509.08922 > 29 Sep 2015