How many copies were broken on the topic of extraterrestrial life. She was strenuously searched, not found, searched again, confused with something else. At the moment, the most promising direction in the search for extraterrestrial life, at least unreasonable, is exoplanets. A lot is known about them at the same time, since new discoveries are made almost every week, and little. The reason for this is the colossal remoteness of all exoplanets from the Earth, which makes it impossible to fly to them or examine their surface closer. As it turned out, this is not the only problem associated with the search for exoplanetary life.
Biomarkers
Due to the fact that we cannot look closely at distant planets, we have to determine the presence or absence of life on them by special biomarkers in the atmosphere. I warn you right away: we have not yet found reliable evidence of exoplanetary life.
Biomarkers in the cosmic sense can serve as traces of the vital activity of organisms - for example, oxygen or methane. If we find these substances in the atmosphere of the planet, then we can assume that plants or animals similar to those on Earth live there.
For our planet, if it is observed by distant extraterrestrial astronomers, ozone can serve as a biomarker, since it is not only formed from O2, but also reliably protects the inhabitants of the Earth from dangerous radiation.
Jet streams are problematic
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As reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, air currents in exoplanet atmospheres could mask biomarkers from terrestrial observers.
A team of scientists led by Ludmila Karone from the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy decided to check how the distribution of gases in the atmospheres of some exoplanets we know of. For testing, they chose the closest exoplanet to us near the star Proxima Centauri and the potentially habitable TRAPPIST-1d.
Both planets are similar: they are relatively small and located close to the parent star, which is why they are tidal capture, and they are always turned to the star with one side. Also on such planets there is a terminator, and this is not about a killer robot from the future, but about a stable border of day and night. And this terminator quite strongly influences the movement of atmospheric gases.
Karone and his team applied the modeling method to the planets and saw that the so-called standing Rosby waves - bends of high-altitude atmospheric currents - would form in the tropics. This is also observed on Earth, and thanks to this, air from the tropics is distributed to other zones. However, on planets with tidal capture, the situation is reversed - there ozone (a possible biomarker) will be concentrated in the tropics or even be hidden.
In addition to the fact that the conclusions are valid only for planets with a rotation period of up to 25 days, Lyudmila Karone herself explains that the absence of ozone in future observations should not mean that there is no oxygen on the planet at all. It can be concentrated in other places, not like on Earth, or just well hidden.
Leonid Romashchenko