Many Worlds

Tag: biosignature

On The Rugged Frontier Of The Hunt For Signs Of Life On Early Earth And Ancient Mars

September 10, 2019 / / 1 Comment

The vigorously debated finding from the Isua greenstone or supercrustal belt, a 1,200-square-mile area of ancient rocks in Greenland.  Proponents say the rises, from .4 to 1.6 inches tall, are  biosignatures of bacteria and sediment mounds that made up stromatolites almost 3.8 billion years ago.  Critics say additional testing has shown they are the result of non-biological forces.  (Nature and Nutman et al.)

Seldom does one rock outcrop get so many visitors in a day, especially when that outcrop is located in rugged, frigid terrain abutting the Greenland Ice Sheet and can be reached only by helicopter.

But this has been a specimen of great importance and notoriety since it appeared from beneath the snow pack some eight years ago. That’s when it was first identified by two startled geologists as something very different from what they had seen in four decades of scouring the geologically revelatory region – the gnarled Isua supercrustal belt – for fossil signs of very early life.

Since that discovery the rock outcrop has been featured in a top journal and later throughout the world as potentially containing the earliest signature of life on Earth – the outlines of half inch to almost two inch-high stromatolite structures between 3.7 and 3.8 billion years old.

The Isua greenstone, or supracrustal belt contains some of the oldest known rocks and outcrops in the world, and is about 100 miles northeast of the capital, Nuuk.

If Earth could support the life needed to form primitive but hardly uncomplicated stromatolites that close to the initial cooling of the planet, then the emergence of life might not be so excruciatingly complex after all. Maybe if the conditions are at all conducive for life on a planet (early Mars comes quickly to mind) then life will probably appear.

Extraordinary claims in science, however, require extraordinary proof, and inevitably other scientists will want to test the claims.

Within two years of that initial ancient stromatolite splash in a Nature paper (led by veteran geologist Allen Nutman of the University of Wollongong in Australia), the same journal published a study that disputed many of the key observations and conclusions of the once-hailed ancient stromatolite discovery.  The paper concluded the outcrop had no signs of early life at all.

Debates and disputes are common in geology as the samples get older,  and especially in high profile science with important implications.  In this case, the implications of what is in the rocks reach into the solar system and the cosmos. … Read more

Getting Real About the Oxygen Biosignature

May 22, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Oxygen, which makes up about 21 percent of the Earth atmosphere, has been embraced as the best biosignature for life on faraway exoplanets. New research shows that detecting distant life via the oxygen biosignature is not so straight-forward, though it probably remains the best show we have. (NASA)

 

I remember the first time I heard about the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and how could and would let us know whether life was present below.

The key was oxygen or its light-modified form, ozone.  Because both oxygen and ozone molecules bond so quickly with other molecules — think rust or iron oxide on Mars, silicon dioxide in the Earth’s crust — it was said that oxygen could only be present in large and detectable quantities if there was a steady and massive source of free oxygen on the planet.

On Earth, this of course is the work of photosynthesizers such as planets, algae and cyanobacteria, which produce oxygen as a byproduct.  No other abiotic, or non-biological, ways were known at the time to produce substantial amounts of atmospheric oxygen, so it seemed that an oxygen signal from afar would be a pretty sure sign of life.

But with the fast growth of the field of exoplanet atmospheres and the very real possibility of having technology available in the years ahead that could measure the components of those atmospheres, scientists have been busy modelling exoplanet formations, chemistry and their atmospheres.

One important goal has been to search for non-biological ways to produce large enough amounts of atmospheric oxygen that might fool us into thinking that life has been found below.

And in recent years, scientists have succeeded in poking holes in the atmospheric oxygen-means-life scenario.

Oxygen bonds quickly with many other molecules. That means has to be resupplied regularly to be present as O2 in an atmosphere . On Earth, O2  is mostly a product of biology, but elsewhere it might be result of non-biological processes. Here is an image of oxygen bubbles in water.

Especially researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) have come up with numerous ways that exoplanets atmospheres can be filled (and constantly refilled) with oxygen that was never part of plant or algal or bacteria photo-chemistry.

In other words, they found potential false positives for atmospheric oxygen as a biosignature, to the dismay of many exoplanet scientists.

In part because she and her own team were involved in some of these oxygen false-positive papers, VPL director Victoria Meadows set out to review, analyze and come to some conclusions about what had become the oxygen-biosignature problem.… Read more

Coming to Terms With Biosignatures

July 28, 2016 / / 0 Comments
Exoplanets are much too far away for missions to visit and explore, so scientists are learning about them remotely. That includes the question of whether they might support life — an aspect of exoplanet science that is getting new attention. This is artist Ron Miller’s impression of an exoplanet.

Exoplanets are much too far away for missions to visit and explore, so scientists are learning about them remotely. That includes the question of whether they might support life — an aspect of exoplanet science that is getting new attention. This is artist Ron Miller’s impression of an exoplanet.

The search for life beyond our solar system has focused largely on the detection of an ever-increasing number of exoplanets, determinations of whether the planets are in a habitable zone, and what the atmospheres of those planets might look like.  It is a sign of how far the field has progressed that scientists are now turning with renewed energy to the question of what might, and what might not, constitute a sign that a planet actually harbors life.

The field of “remote biosignatures” is still in its early stages, but a NASA-sponsored workshop underway in Seattle has brought together dozens of researchers from diverse fields to dig aggressively into the science and ultimately convey its conclusions back to the exoplanet community and then to the agency.

While a similar NASA-sponsored biosignatures workshop put together a report in 2002, much has changed since then in terms of understanding the substantial complexities and possibilities of the endeavor.  There is also a new sense of urgency based on the observing capabilities of some of the space and ground telescopes scheduled to begin operations in the next decade, and the related need to know with greater specificity what to look for.

“The astrobiology community has been thinking a lot more about what it means to be a biosignature,” said Shawn Domogal-Goldman of the Goddard Space Flight Center, one of the conveners of the meeting.  Some of the reason why is to give advice to those scientists and engineers putting together space telescope missions, but some is the pressing need to maintain scientific rigor for the good of one of humankind’s greatest challenges.

“We don’t want to spend 20 years of our lives and billions in taxpayer money working for a mission to find evidence of life, and learn too late that our colleagues don’t accept our conclusions,” he told me.  “So we’re bringing them all together now so we can all learn from each other about what would be, and what would not be, a real biosignature.”

 

How to measure the chemical signatures in the atmosphere of a transiting exoplanet. The total light measured off-transit (B in the lower left figure) decreases during the transit, when only the light from the star is measured (A). By subtracting A from B, we get the planet counterpart, and from this the “chemical fingerprints” of the planet atmosphere can be revealed. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

How to measure the chemical signatures in the atmosphere of a transiting exoplanet. The total light measured off-transit (B in the lower left figure) decreases during the transit, when only the light from the star is measured (A).

… Read more

Exoplanet Biosignatures: Crucial and Confounding

July 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments
Curiosity rover and evidnce of managnese oxide on rock at xxx

The Curiosity rover at the Windjana outcrop on Mars, where it found evidence of mangnese oxide on rocks and in rock fissures.  The mineral is formed only in the presence of water and plentiful oxygen. (NASA)

Early in the Curiosity rover’s trek across Gale Crater on Mars, team member and Los Almos National Laboratory  planetary scientist Nina Lanza reported finding surprisingly high concentrations of the mineral manganese oxide.  It was showing up as a blackish-purple fill to cracks in rocks, and possibly as a surface covering to others.

Lanza, who had some experience with the common and much-debated mineral– found in the American Southwest and other arid climes — initially proposed that it just might be related to terrestrial rock varnishes.  This was a bold proposal because manganese-oxide rock varnishes on Earth are almost always associated with microbes, which are known to concentrate the mineral.  So was this a biosignature coming from Mars?

Two years later, Lanza and others on the Curiosity team have published a paper describing in detail the regular detection of Martian manganese oxide, sometimes in concentrations higher than what is found on Earth.  Based on the surrounding geology and geochemistry, the team then concluded that when the mineral was formed, the Mars atmosphere had levels of oxygen much higher than previously imagined.

This conclusion flows from the fact that the mineral is only formed, on Earth at least, when plentiful oxygen and plentiful water are present.  Indeed, manganese oxides (and many other minerals) began forming in earnest here only after the so-called “great oxygenation event” that, through bacterial photosynthesis, delivered vastly more oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere.

On Mars, the manganese oxide was found largely in sedimentary rock cracks, and to geologists that means it was distributed via flowing water after the rocks had solidified.

Finding substantial water and oxygen together on a planet — in our solar system or beyond — has often been described as providing a strong case for a habitable, and perhaps inhabited, planet.

 

A plankton bloom off the coast of Washington state, US, June 2002, taken by astronauts from the International Space Station.

The oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere increased dramatically around 2.3 billion years ago with the fast spread of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, and other photosynthesizing micro organisms in the oceans.  The image is of a plankton bloom (dominated by blue-green algae) off the coast of Washington state, taken by astronauts from the International Space Station. (NASA)

This all sounds suggestive of life on what Lanza calls “middle-aged” Mars.  But here’s where things get tricky.… Read more

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