Methane may be the key to discoveries of life in space

Sunday 17/April/2022 – 03:53 AM

A group of scientists says methane may be the key to discovering alien life in space, according to a new study by astronomers.

The discovery of methane in space

According to StudyFind, the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can detect methane and the monitoring is scheduled to begin in the summer.

The recent study revealed that the gas was found looming on Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus.

“If you detect a lot of methane on a rocky planet, you usually need a huge resource to explain it,” study co-author Dr Joshua Krissansen Totton, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement.

“We know that biological activity produces large amounts of methane on Earth, and it may have happened early on Earth as well because making methane is fairly easy to metabolize,” he added.

The study showed that it could be the source of methane in the atmosphere of a rocky planet, as the research team evaluated the planetary conditions necessary for methane to be a good biosignature.

The methane is part of the puzzle

Oxygen is often talked about as one of the best biosignatures, but it can potentially be difficult to detect using JWST, lead author Maggie Thompson, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at the university, said in a statement.

“We wanted to provide a framework for interpreting the observations, so if we see a rocky planet with methane in it, we know what other observations are needed to be a convincing biosignature.”

Thompson continued: Methane is part of the puzzle, but to determine if there is life on a planet, you have to think about its geochemistry, how it interacts with its star, and the many processes that can affect the planet’s atmosphere over geological timescales.