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Climate scientists join search for alien Earths

By Chukwuma Muanya and Wole Oyebade
23 April 2015   |   5:57 am
THE hunt for life beyond the Solar System is gaining new partners: Unitred States National Aeronautic Space Agency (NASA) climatologists.
Kepler 186-f is the first Earth-sized exoplanet to be found that may be capable of supporting life. image source twitter

Kepler 186-f is the first Earth-sized exoplanet to be found that may be capable of supporting life. image source twitter

• NASA initiative seeks to bolster interdisciplinary science in hunt for extraterrestrial life
• Fashola, envoy seek improved control of phenomenon for human survival

THE hunt for life beyond the Solar System is gaining new partners: Unitred States National Aeronautic Space Agency (NASA) climatologists.

After more than 30 years of studying Earth, a team at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York will adapt its global climate model to simulate conditions on potentially habitable exoplanets.

According to the report published in Nature, the effort is part of a broader push to identify Earth-like worlds that NASA launched on April 20 at a meeting in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, Lagos State governor, Babatunde Fashola (SAN) and members of diplomatic corps on Tuesday called for effective climate change control for continuous survival of human beings on planet earth.

The dignitaries, at the opening of the seventh Lagos State Climate Change Summit, said the control must be complemented with the development of adaptation strategies that will preserve nature and its gifts.

Already, the agency’s space-based Kepler telescope has pinpointed more than 1,000 alien planets by observing the brief interruption of starlight that signals a planet passing in front of its parent star.

At least five of these planets are similar in size to Earth and located in the ‘habitable zone’, where liquid water could persist. The next step would be to detect light passing through exoplanet atmospheres, which could hold clues to conditions on these distant worlds.

“We have to start thinking about these things as more than planetary objects,” says Anthony Del Genio, a climate modeller who is leading the GISS effort. “All of a sudden, this has become a topic not just for astronomers, but for planetary scientists and now climate scientists.”

Del Genio’s group is one of 16 — ranging from Earth and planetary scientists to solar physicists and astrophysicists — that are participating in NASA’s new Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) programme. The effort has an initial annual budget of roughly US$10 million to $12 million.

“We are bringing together a bunch of different disciplines, and they all look at the formation and functioning of planets in different ways,” says Mary Voytek, who directs NASA’s astrobiology programme and organized NExSS. Although interest is high, Voytek says, communication remains a challenge. “You can’t even get these communities to agree on a definition of the habitable zone.”

The initiative is based in part on the Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, which launched in 2001 and now has 55 researchers from 23 institutions collaborating on interdisciplinary exoplanet research. “When we started this, people thought we were crazy,” says Victoria Meadows, an astronomer and the project’s principal investigator. “But this is not something that a single discipline can address.”

NExSS will expand the network of researchers collaborating on exoplanets, she says. That should help scientists to make sense of existing data and observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which are both scheduled for launch in 2018. It could also help NASA develop missions to hunt for exoplanets in the 2020s and beyond.

At GISS, Del Genio’s team has already started repurposing the institution’s workhorse Earth-system climate model. The researchers are combing through its source code to locate simple parameters that are fixed for Earth, such as 24-hour days and 365-day orbits, in order to create an exoplanet model that can be adjusted for different planetary systems. Initial simulations will focus on the Earth’s ancient past and the evolution of Venus and Mars. Although neither can support life today, each may have had liquid surface water at some time.

The team’s ultimate goal is to explore the concept of a habitable zone by mixing and matching some of the key factors that determine whether a planet can support life. By feeding these parameters into the exoplanet model, the group will create a database of ‘hypothetical atmospheres’ with spectra that could be visible to astronomers.

Del Genio’s group is one of several that are using climate models in exoplanet research. A group led by physicist François Forget at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in Paris used such a model to explore the runaway warming that occurs when water vapour builds up in a planet’s atmosphere, trapping outgoing radiation. In December 2013, they reported in Nature1 that the early Earth could withstand more solar radiation before its oceans boiled off than scientists had thought. Two other groups have done similar experiments2, 3, and Del Genio says that his team is exploring the same issue.

The 3D models could be particularly useful for defining the habitable zone, and the place to start is the Solar System, says James Kasting, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park who works on one-dimensional exoplanet models. But ultimately, he adds, progress will depend on better observations of exoplanets.

“In 15 or 20 years, we might get a spectrum of a planet that looks Earth-like, and then every­one will be out with their models trying to model that planet,” he says. “I would like it to happen quicker — but we need a big tele­scope.”

Speakers at the Lagos Climate Change Summit reiterated that improved concerted effort was important because nature does not need human to survive, but human beings really do.

“As we have heard from conservation international,” Fashola said, “nature and the environment do not need us, but we need them.”

“They will evolve, can we evolve? Nature and environment have been here long before we came. Many like you and I have come and gone; we have come and certainly we would go.

“The greater challenge therefore is for us to understand how to preserve nature’s gifts. To adapt to nature’s evolution, mitigates against the hazards of the environment and seek for sustainability in all that we do,” Fashola said.

The governor, who thanked stakeholders and Lagosians for their support in the last seven years, used the opportunity to drum up support for the Lagos State governor-elect Akinwunmi Ambode, saying with their support, the state government’s effort on improving the environment would be sustained.

He said; “To you all, my gratitude is deep and profound. The only thing I can add is to make a request, that as I yield the baton of government to our governor-elect, Akinwunmi Ambode, you will not drop the baton.

“I urge you to give him more support than you have given to me to continue this awareness as regards danger to the environment and to evolve mitigations and adaptation strategies that will help us all survive and realise our aspirations.

“Every year, our summit has been built around a theme that seeks to highlight these issues of conservation’s, mitigations, adaptation, vulnerability and their impacts on our daily lives. From transportation to housing, infrastructure and our reproductive lives, our life expectancy, our businesses and our general well being, our poverty or prosperity, the environment has played a crucial role and so we ignore it to our own peril.”

Fashola said this year’s theme provides government with the opportunity to measure progress, assess what have not been overcome and chart a course for the future.

Expressing satisfactions on the efforts of his administration in the area of environment, Fashola said not even his critics could deny the success and the greener Lagos he is leaving behind.

“After planting over five million trees, creating 196 parks and over 90, 000 jobs that are not in existent when we started, I am proud to acknowledge the success of our greening initiative,” Fashola said.

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