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The light reflected from the planet will show its habitability

09.03.2012

Three astronomers from Chile, Britain and Spain have found a way to determine the presence of life on exoplanets. They discovered this possibility by observing the light of the Earth reflected from the Moon. Scientists have proven that even in this weak reflection, strong signals can be found that indicate the biological processes taking place here.

To date, 760 exoplanets have been discovered. The craving of scientists to hunt for them is explained not only by purely scientific interest, but also by attempts to find traces of life that can be "pulled out" from the light coming from them. Here, spectroscopic measurements can give a lot - having detected, say, molecular oxygen or methane in large quantities from absorption or emission lines, we can already talk about signs of life. The main obstacle here is the light of the star itself, it is very difficult to separate it from the same light reflected from the planet and much weaker. This task is difficult, but solvable, and one of the solutions was proposed by the mentioned trio of astronomers - Michael Sterzhik from the European Southern Observatory (Chile), Stefano Bangulo from the Armag Observatory (Britain) and Enric Palle from the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands. The fact is that the reflected light is always polarized, and the own light of a star has no polarization. On this account, there is a special optical technique called spectropolarimetry, with its help the light of a star can be isolated.

That's what scientists at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile were doing for two days last year, one in April and one in June, when the VLT was scheduled to observe the Moon. They focused on the 500-900 nm spectrum, which corresponds to visible light and the infrared part closest to it. The moon at night reflects mostly sunlight, but both days the polarization was very strong - about 10%. By studying the polarized part of the light, the scientists found a narrow peak at 760 nm, corresponding to the presence of molecular oxygen, which is released in large quantities only during plant photosynthesis. Another signature of the plant was left at the red end of the spectrum, at a length of about 700 nm - a sharp and deep dip in this place meant the presence of a large amount of vegetation, which intensively absorbs sunlight of this frequency. In other words, the presence of vegetation on an exoplanet can also be determined from Earth.

Today, unfortunately, the possibilities of spectropolarimetry are limited only by observing gas giants, and even then - this will become possible only a few years after the most powerful ground-based telescopes are upgraded accordingly. The real search for life on exoplanets will begin in 2019, when NASA will launch a specialized New Worlds Mission space telescope equipped with everything necessary for such research.

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Even photovoltaic panels that use free energy from the Sun do not help, since the cost of panels, despite government subsidies, remains very high. And even in Germany, which abandoned nuclear power plants and tries not to pollute the atmosphere with its cheap coal, electricity prices in 2015 for the first time in 10 years fell by an average of 1%, but still remain at the level of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour. True, this price includes 16% VAT, 7% electricity tax, 6% tax on the use of public space for power transmission towers, and 21% tax in favor of renewable energy sources.

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The device uses a Graetzel cell - a dye-sensitized solar cell, which is mounted on a transparent electrically conductive film made of PEDOT (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polymer. Under this film there is another film of pyroelectric material with a thermoelectric converter. When sunlight or other light of the same spectrum hits a photovoltaic cell, it generates electricity. Light that does not hit the cell passes through the polymer film and heats it up. The thermoelectric converter then uses the heat to generate additional electricity.

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