Scientists looks for signs of life on planets outside solar system, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have detected Earth’s own brand of sunscreen, ozone, in our atmosphere by taking advantage of a total lunar eclipse.
“One of NASA’s major goals is to identify planets that could support life,” Allison Youngblood of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder said.
“But how would we know a habitable or an uninhabited planet if we saw one? What would they look like with the techniques that astronomers have at their disposal for characterising the atmospheres of exoplanets? That’s why it’s important to develop models of Earth’s spectrum as a template for categorising atmospheres on extrasolar planets,” she explained.
According to IANS, For the research, Hubble did not look at Earth directly. Instead, the astronomers used the Moon as a mirror to reflect sunlight, which had passed through Earth’s atmosphere, and then reflected back towards Hubble.
“Finding ozone is significant because it is a photochemical byproduct of molecular oxygen, which is itself a byproduct of life,” Youngblood said.
This is the first time a total lunar eclipse was captured at ultraviolet wavelengths and from a space telescope.