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Alien imposters: Planets with oxygen don't necessarily have life
In their search for life in solar systems near and far, researchers have often accepted the presence of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere as the surest sign that life may be present there. A new Johns Hopkins study, however, recommends a reconsideration of that rule of thumb.
Simulating in the lab the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, researchers successfully created both organic compounds and oxygen, absent of life.
The findings, published Dec. 11 by the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, serve as a cautionary tale for researchers who suggest the presence of oxygen and organics on distant worlds is evidence of life there.
"Our experiments produced oxygen and organic molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life in the lab, proving that the presence of both doesn't definitively indicate life," says Chao He, assistant research scientist in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the study's first author. "Researchers need to more carefully consider how these molecules are produced."
[...] "People used to suggest that oxygen and organics being present together indicates life, but we produced them abiotically in multiple simulations," He says. "This suggests that even the co-presence of commonly accepted biosignatures could be a false positive for life."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @04:44PM (1 child)
And planets with life don't necessarily have oxygen. It is ridiculously presumptuous to think life can only exist in the presence of oxygen. We often confuse "what we know or have observed" with "what is possible or what can be".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @05:45PM
Virtually NO scientist thinks life can only exist in the presence of oxygen. This is just you putting words into their mouths.
Life existed, and even thrived, for a billion years, here on earth, without atmospheric oxygen. Every single biologist in the world already knows this.