Two astronomers have rethought the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by creating a “star map” of exoplanets that have a direct line of sight on our planet when it crosses in front of our sun.
Transits provide important information about the composition and atmosphere of a planet and thus about the viability of life.
Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell College of Arts and Sciences in New York and director of the Carl Sagan Institute, and Joshua Pepper, associate professor of physics at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania compiled a list of 1,004 potentially habitable exoplanets with Sun-like stars, all within 326 light years (100 parsecs) from Earth.
Using data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) star catalog and the Gaia star map, the pair have reduced large numbers of exoplanets to those who would be able to discover traces of life on our planet if similarly advanced civilizations would have our own.
The exoplanets all align themselves with the earth’s ecliptic or the orbit around the sun, which would give them a perspective for observing our biosphere.
About 508 of the planets on the list have a window of at least 10 hours in which to see Earth in each orbit.
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“Let us reverse the perspective to that of other stars and ask from which point of view other observers could find the earth as a transit planet.” Said Kaltenegger.
“When we are looking for an intelligent life in the universe that wants to find us and get in touch” She added “We have just created the map we should be looking at first.”
With NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launch in 2021, our own transit observations of potentially habitable exoplanets in the universe will increase massively.
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