🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE A new paper asks which exoplanets could find Earth. Such worlds could be targets for SETI searches.
“What if there were intelligent beings on another planet? And if they were looking at the Earth, which of those star systems could they be living in that would enable them to see Earth?” he says., Pepper and Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, went looking for planets that were aligned with Earth’s orbit around the sun. This would let any alien observers witness the sun drop in brightness a tiny bit whenever Earth passes in front of it.
So far, the researchers say they've identified five exoplanets that are near enough to Earth that extrasolar astronomers could theoretically see us. From those worlds, Earth would appear as a tiny blob of shadow passing in front of our sun. As a planet passes in front of its star, astronomers also have a rare opportunity to peer into its atmosphere . When a thin sliver of starlight passes through the world’s gaseous envelope, it picks up information about what the atmosphere is made of.
“As far as we know, [an] atmosphere like the Earth [has], there’s really no way to mimic that without life,” Pepper says.
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